John Lennon Wasn't the "Cool" Beatle. Paul McCartney Was.
I learned about the Beatles in the spring of 1980 from my older brother Craig. I was only a kid, but I started listening obsessively to their music and reading everything I could get my hands on about the band.
But 1980 was a bad year to become a Beatles fan: John Lennon was murdered in December of that same year.
I’m still a massive fan — so much so that my husband Michael and I recently went to Liverpool, England, to see the hometown of the band’s four famous members: Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey (who is better known by his stage name, Ringo Starr).
There are lots of reasons why I love the Beatles:
I agree with the critical consensus that they’re the best rock band ever. They also created the idea of the modern rock band, pioneering “concept albums,” and distinctive covers, and lyric sheets, and stadium tours, and all kinds of studio and musical innovations, and on and on and on.
They turned pop music into an art form. Virtually every one of their 213+ songs includes something unique and interesting — like those fantastic staccato violin chords in “Eleanor Rigby,” or the delightful lyrics to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and how, at the end of the song, Desmond and Molly happily trade places, and she goes off to work in the marketplace, and he stays home with the kids — in 1968, about a decade before anyone had even heard the concept of a “stay-at-home husband.”
Source: Brent Hartinger and Michael Jensen/yahoo.com
