For young students heading back to school each fall, few accessories proclaim their pop-culture tastes as conspicuously as a lunch box. Since their midcentury golden age and before, the metal carriers not only served as totes for tuna sandwiches and bruised bananas, but have been ...read more
Jesus Christ When British pop artist Sir Peter Blake and his then-wife Jann Haworth developed the idea for a photomontage of famous people to grace the cover of “Sgt. Pepper,” Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon gave them a list of possible figures to include. ...read more
By late 1963, The Beatles—guitarists John Lennon and George Harrison; bassist Paul McCartney; and drummer Ringo Starr—were already a household name in the United Kingdom and much of Europe. More than 15 million viewers had tuned in to their performance on “Val Parnell’s Sunday ...read more
“I wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch and we’re putting it out for dinner.” That’s the way John Lennon told the story of “Instant Karma,” one of his most memorable songs as a solo artist and the third Lennon single to appear before the official breakup of the Beatles. ...read more
On October 7, 1975, a New York State Supreme Court judge reverses a deportation order for John Lennon, allowing him to remain legally in his adoptive home of New York City. Protests against the Vietnam War had escalated significantly following the announcement of the Cambodia ...read more
On March 11, 1997, Paul McCartney, a former member of the most successful rock band in history, The Beatles, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his “services to music.” The 54-year-old lad from Liverpool became Sir Paul in a centuries-old ceremony of pomp and solemnity at ...read more
John Lennon, a former member of the Beatles, the rock group that transformed popular music in the 1960s, is shot and killed by an obsessed fan in New York City. The 40-year-old artist was entering his luxury Manhattan apartment building when Mark David Chapman shot him four ...read more
On February 7, 1964, Pan Am Yankee Clipper flight 101 from London Heathrow lands at New York’s Kennedy Airport—and “Beatlemania” arrives. It was the first visit to the United States by the Beatles, a British rock-and-roll quartet that had just scored its first No. 1 U.S. hit six ...read more
The Beatles took America by storm during their famous first visit, wowing the millions who watched them during their historic television appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. But after the first great rush of stateside Beatlemania, the Beatles promptly returned to ...read more
Paul McCartney’s arrival at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on January 16, 1980, marked his first visit to Japan since the Beatles tour of 1966. The occasion was a planned 11-city concert tour by his band Wings. Instead, Paul’s visit was limited to a nine-day stint in the ...read more
In England, no one took much notice of the John Lennon quotation that later set off a media frenzy in America. Chalk it up to a fundamental difference in religious outlook between Britain and America, or to a fundamental difference in sense of humor. Whatever the reason, it was ...read more
After the shocking assassination of John Lennon, thousands of mourners gathered spontaneously outside his and Yoko Ono’s Central Park West apartment building, the Dakota. Tens of thousands more gathered six days later in New York, Liverpool and other world cities to honor Yoko’s ...read more
At approximately 8:12 p.m. Eastern time, Sunday, February 9, 1964, The Ed Sullivan Show returned from a commercial (for Anacin pain reliever), and there was Ed Sullivan standing before a restless crowd. He tried to begin his next introduction, but then stopped and extended his ...read more
Bob Dylan’s instant reaction to the recently completed album Paul McCartney brought by his London hotel room for a quick listen in the spring of 1967 may not sound like the most thoughtful analysis ever offered, but it still to hit the nail on the head. “Oh I get it,” Dylan said ...read more
In early decades of the 20th century, the Viennese beauty Alma Mahler inspired groundbreaking works by a quartet of husbands and lovers drawn from nearly every creative discipline: music (Gustav Mahler); literature (Franz Werfel); art (Oskar Kokoschka); and architecture (Walter ...read more
The front-page headline of the Liverpool Evening Express on July 6, 1957, read “MERSEYSIDE SIZZLES,” in reference to the heat wave then gripping not just northern England, but all of Europe. The same headline could well have been used over a story that received no coverage at all ...read more
In the autumn of 1963, Beatlemania was a raging epidemic in Britain, and it was rapidly spreading across the European continent. But in the United States, where the likes of Bobby Vinton and Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs sat atop the pop charts, John, Paul, George and Ringo ...read more
On August 27, 1967, Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, was found dead of an accidental drug overdose in his Sussex, England, home. The following day, the headline in the London Daily Mirror read “EPSTEIN (The Beatle-Making Prince of Pop) DIES AT 32.” Brian Epstein was, by all ...read more
It was the summer of 1981, and after an 11-year hiatus, the sound of the Fab Four once again ruled the radio airwaves. Only instead of John, Paul, George and Ringo, this time the world had to settle for Bas, Hans, Jaap and Okkie—the Dutch studio musicians behind the phenomenon ...read more
On August 24, 1981, Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life for the murder of John Lennon, a founding member of The Beatles, one of the most successful bands in the history of popular music. On December 8, 1980, Chapman shot and killed the 40-year-old singer, ...read more
The London drug squad appears at house of George Harrison and Pattie Boyd with a warrant and drug-sniffing canines. Boyd immediately used the direct hotline to Beatles headquarters and George returned to find his home turned upside down. He is reported to have told the officers ...read more
John Lennon and Yoko Ono are arrested for drug possession at their home near Montagu Square in London, England. The arrests came at a tempestuous time for the couple. Only days earlier, an announcement was made that Ono was pregnant, creating a scandal because both Lennon and Ono ...read more
