John Lennon was just 17 when he formed his first band, The Black Jacks. The band was made up entirely of classmates at Quarry Bank Grammar School in Liverpool, and almost immediately after they started, they changed their name to The Quarry Men. They played skiffle music, a mixture of folk, jazz, and blues which was popular in England at the time.

  In the summer of 1957, The Quarry Men were setting up for a performance in a church hall when another member of the band introduced Lennon to Paul McCartney, then a 15-year-old self-taught left-handed guitar player. He auditioned for the band when they finished their set, and was immediately invited to join, which he did in October, 1957.

  By February 1958 Lennon was moving increasingly away from skiffle and toward rock 'n' roll. This prompted the band's banjo player to leave, giving McCartney the opportunity to introduce Lennon to his friend and former classmate, George Harrison.

  The band, which then consisted of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, piano player Duff Lowe and drummer Colin Hanton recorded a demo consisting of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day" and a Lennon-McCartney original, "In Spite of All the Danger."

  The Quarry Men broke up early in 1959. Lennon and McCartney continued their songwriting, and Harrison joined a group called The Les Stewart Quartet. The Quarry Men briefly reunited when Harrison's group fell apart, and he recruited Lennon and McCartney to help him fulfill a contract with Liverpool's Casbah Coffee Club. When that gig ended, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison continued performing as Johnny and the Moondogs.

  In 1960, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were joined by drummer Pete Best (whose mother owned The Casbah Coffee Club where the three had played many times) and bassist Stu Sutcliffe, a friend of Lennon's from the Liverpool Art School. They went through a succession of names -- Long John and The Beatles, The Silver Beetles, The Beat Brothers -- before settling on The Beatles.

  After touring Scotland (backing a singer named Johnny Gentle) the group was invited to play the first of a series of club dates in Hamburg, Germany. They returned to Hamburg twice more in 1961 and 1962, after which they became increasingly popular on the Liverpool club circuit.

  Sutcliffe left the band after 18 months to pursue his art studies (as well as photographer Astrid Kirchherr, whom he had met in Hamburg) so it was Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Best who met and auditioned for Parlophone Records (a subsidiary of EMI) producer George Martin in June 1962, at the Abbey Road Studios where they would eventually do most of their recording.

  Martin liked everything about the band except Best, who was by this time was not on the best of terms with the other band members either. Ringo Starr, the drummer for another popular Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, was recruited to replace Best.

  In September, 1962, the band's first single, "Love Me Do" was released, eventually reaching 17 in the UK. It would be almost two years until the song was released (and became a 1 hit) in the US, because of the skepticism of Parlophone's sister label in the US, Capitol Records, about the prospects of a British band succeeding in America.

  Their first album, Please Please Me was released in the UK in March 1963. The singles, "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You" received scattered, limited airplay in the US. The teen audience on Dick Clark's American Bandstand reacted to "She Loves You" by laughing at the band's "mop top" haircuts.

  After their second album, With The Beatles became only the second album ever to sell a million copies in the UK, Vee Jay Records, predominantly an R&B label, obtained the US rights to most of the songs from Please Please Me, and released them on an album titled Introducing ... The Beatles in January 1964.

  A booking on Ed Sullivan's popular CBS network variety show in February 1964 (watched by an estimated 73-million people) and the fact that the band had two 1 albums in the UK the previous year, finally convinced Capitol Records to sign The Beatles to a US record deal.

  By April, 1964, the band's singles occupied the top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That summer, they toured New Zealand and Australia, where their arrival in Adelaide was greeted by a crowd estimated at more than 300,000. The first Beatles movie, A Hard Day's Night was released in 1964.

  All told, the band released seven albums in the US and UK in 1964, all but three of them charting at 1. Two others peaked at 2, and the third, the soundtrack from a UK TV documentary (The Beatles Story) reached 7.
Beatlemania was responsible for the concept of the stadium concert. More than 55-thousand screaming fans -- at the time, the most ever to have attended a single concert -- packed New York's Shea Stadium in August 1965. Two months later, the Fab Four became Members of the Order of the British Empire, one of the highest honors bestowed in the UK, usually to military and government officials.

  The Beatles' second movie, Help! came out in 1965, and the soundtrack was one of the four albums the band released that year.

  The band released just two albums in 1966, one of them a US compilation of previous UK-only releases (Yesterday and Today). Although the other, Revolver, is considered to be one of the Beatles' best albums, the sands beneath the Beatlemania behemoth were obviously beginning to shift.

  In the summer of 1966 the band was attacked by an angry crowd in the Philippines after turning down an invitation to breakfast at the Presidential Palace. That disastrous tour had no sooner ended when Lennon set off a huge wave of record burning protests when he suggested in an interview that "Christianity is dying" and that the Beatles "are more popular than Jesus now."

  In August 1966, the band made what would turn out to be its last public performance -- at Candlestick Park in San Francisco -- lasting barely over a half hour. The decision was made to stop touring and concentrate on writing and recording.

  Although they had lost some of their luster, The Beatles continued to produce critically and commercially successful albums: in 1967, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the soundtrack from their third feature film, Magical Mystery Tour.

  The band spent the first part of 1968 in India, studying transcendental meditation under the tutelage of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When they returned, they announced the creation of their own label, Apple Records, and went to work on the double album, The Beatles (also known as The White Album) which was released in November 1968.

  Disputes, disagreements and disharmony among band members had been gradually increasing, become especially apparent during the White Album recording sessions. The band's last performance together outside the studio (a promotional event on the roof of Apple Studios) came in January 1969. Their last recording session (for Abbey Road) followed in August.

  In September 1969, Lennon told the band that he was leaving. The others persuaded him not to go public until they made one more effort to get an acceptable version of their final album, Let It Be, which had been recorded several months before Abbey Road but shelved after two attempts by producer George Martin to put it in final form.

  Phil Spector, who had produced Lennon's "Instant Karma" single was enlisted to make a last ditch effort at producing Let It Be (originally titled Get Back.) McCartney, unhappy with the way several of the songs were produced, tried without success to stop the album's release.

The band's breakup was announced in April 1970, a month before Let It Be was released. Documents filed on December 31, 1970 officially ended the legal entity known as The Beatles.

Life After The Beatles: 1970-Present:

  All four of The Beatles carried on with successful solo careers after the breakup of The Beatles.

John Lennon released seven albums between 1970 and 1980, the last one just three weeks before he was murdered, at age 40, outside his New York City apartment in December 1980. An additional album, Milk and Honey, was released (in 1984) after Lennon's death.

George Harrison released a dozen solo albums (and two with the Traveling Wilburys) and produced films through his company, Handmade Films. Harrison died of cancer at the age of 58 in November 2001.

Ringo Starr has released nearly two dozen albums and appeared in about the same number of films since the breakup of The Beatles. He continues to tour every few years with his All Starr Band.

Paul McCartney has been the most prolific ex-Beatle as a solo artist, with his late wife, Linda and with his band Wings. He continues to tour and record, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful musician and contemporary songwriter in history.

  Stu Sutcliffe died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 22, shortly after he left the band. Pete Best continues to perform with The Pete Best Band, and does frequent personal appearances and interviews about the history of The Beatles.

  In addition to the 23 albums (counting soundtracks and separate US and UK releases) released during the band's life (1960-1970) there have been more than 150 compilations, recorded interviews and videos issued. Hundreds of books have been written about their personal lives, their music, and their influence on pop culture and rock music.

  Their original record label, EMI and the Guinness Book of World Records estimate that more than 1-billion Beatles albums, singles and CDs have been sold worldwide. Authentic Beatles memorabilia continues to command huge sums. Recently an audio tape of a 1974 interview with Lennon sold at auction for more than $38,000. At the same auction, McCartney's handwritten lyrics for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" brought $192,000.