I see a sad-ass old white dude, wandering around the stage trying to pretend he's a talented black musician while hiding his baldness under a straw hat that fools no one.
I see a sad-ass old white dude, wandering around the stage trying to pretend he's a talented black musician while hiding his baldness under a straw hat that fools no one.
Attaboy! Your snarky comments are typical of one who doesn't like any music made before 1999.
In March 1957, John Lennon, then aged sixteen, formed a skiffle group with several friends from Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool. They briefly called themselves the Blackjacks, before changing their name to the Quarrymen after discovering that a respected local group was already using the other name.[3] Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney joined them as a rhythm guitarist shortly after he and Lennon met that July.[4] In February 1958, McCartney invited his friend George Harrison to watch the band. The fifteen-year-old auditioned for Lennon, impressing him with his playing, but Lennon initially thought Harrison was too young for the band. After a month of Harrison's persistence, during a second meeting (arranged by McCartney), he performed the lead guitar part of the instrumental song "Raunchy" on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus,[5] and they enlisted him as their lead guitarist.[6][7]
By January 1959, Lennon's Quarry Bank friends had left the group, and he began his studies at the Liverpool College of Art.[8] The three guitarists, billing themselves at least three times as Johnny and the Moondogs,[9] were playing rock and roll whenever they could find a drummer.[10] Lennon's art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe, who had just sold one of his paintings and was persuaded to purchase a bass guitar, joined in January 1960, and it was he who suggested changing the band's name to Beatals, as a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets.[11][12] They used this name until May, when they became the Silver Beetles, before undertaking a brief tour of Scotland as the backing group for pop singer and fellow Liverpudlian Johnny Gentle. By early July, they had refashioned themselves as the Silver Beatles, and by the middle of August shortened the name to The Beatles.
It still isn't clear to me how 'Beatals' (their original name) was a tribute to Buddy Holly, perhaps a combo of 'beetles' and 'beatnik' -- this was still the beatnik era when the group formed. Holly's Crickets seem to provide the needed insect allusion.
