Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Beatles Quotes from famous persons: Jon Landau, Ian Brown, George Harrison, Joe Perry, Paul McCartney. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Beatles Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles.
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People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in ‘Firefly?’ Because I don’t know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.
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My parents were always playing records: My mom was really into the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac, and my dad was more Billy Squire, Whitesnake, ’80s hair metal. But I think there’s that crucial point where you become an adolescent and you don’t want to listen to your parents’ music.
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I cannot bear assaults of any kind, and it seems to me that the Beatles essentially were out to affront and to assault.
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It was amazing for me growing up in the musical decade of the ’60s. I saw The Beatles on television and went out and bought an electric guitar.
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Growing up, I was listening to a ton of Motown music, Otis Redding, Aretha, and then there was the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. These were all people that I felt as though they truly felt every single lyric they said, and they weren’t afraid of imperfection.
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We didn’t want to be the girlfriends of the Beatles. We wanted to be the Beatles.
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I was a huge Beatles fan. We could talk about who I listened to growing up and what my sources were, but certainly the Beatles were a late, important resource for me, and I just took my guitar and a handful of songs, and I decided, well, I’ll just go over and travel around Europe and see what comes of it.
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I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys.
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I’d always wanted to work in the studio and experiment with sounds. Things that I’m really influenced by and that I love are like The Beatles and Radiohead, and all those records by bands whose music is really involved.
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You’re always frustrated, you don’t have the chance to do a song on the album, like the Beatles did with Ringo and George, or like Led Zeppelin, where everybody was given a chance to contribute. There never is a chance with the Stones.
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The Beatles, the Small Faces and the Kinks were great bands, but that was in the ’60s.
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I translated Beatles songs for my English class.
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There were certain Ray Charles albums and a couple of early Marvin Gaye records that I used to listen to with a vengeance. That’s how you forge a style. It excites you, and you lean toward it almost unconsciously. I was also a Beatles fanatic, but I didn’t emulate them the way I did the R&B artists.
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The Beatles never got through to all ages, nor did Elvis Presley, or any of the other monuments of mediocrity that we’ve had.
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I remember when I was a kid, every time the Beatles were on the radio, my dad would say he’d give me a dollar if I could tell him what band it was. So by the time I was about nine, I knew to just say ‘The Beatles,’ and I’d get a dollar out of it.
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I thought if Oasis could get away with sounding like The Beatles, I could get away with sounding like Abba.
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I’m a huge music fan. I usually say that if I had been born with a musical inclination, it would’ve been great. The Beatles changed everything for me, and I wanted to be a journalist for ‘Rolling Stone.’ I’m a big music fan in a Cameron Crowe way, kind of in a spectator way.
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It’s true that when I was younger and I first got interested in music, I used to read books about the Stones and the Beatles and how they listened to Muddy Waters and people like that when they were starting out, who are much less well known now than the Rolling Stones. The Stones really changed blues.
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In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I’d grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.
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Food culture is like listening to the Beatles – it’s international, it’s very positive, it’s inventive and creative.
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I grew up loving classic rock music – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones – and then one day I heard ‘Baby One More Time’ on the radio and I thought ‘What is this?’ I was eight and it changed my life.
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Personally speaking, I think the Beatles were our biggest influence.
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I get my inspiration for my songs and the lyrics from experiences in my life, but I’m also very inspired by the Beatles and Cyndi Lauper, as I really like their music.
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My music was typically continental – nothing like, say, The Beatles.
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Paul forced the Beatles to work a lot harder than they would have otherwise, and he did the same thing with Wings.
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My dad is a huge folk music fan, so growing up, there were always records playing in my house. Carole King, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles – I grew up with this music, and I was aware of how special this music was to a lot of people.
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My whole experience with the Beatles was really no different from any other band, except it was the Beatles.
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I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.
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As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
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We were very influenced by The Beatles, no question.
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For us… you know, we’re not The Beatles.
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I’m bigger than the Beatles!
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The Beatles were great, but Beethoven and Mozart were phenomenal. Both will be remembered for centuries, but it will always be clear which were most in touch with the soul of humanity.
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I’m a giant Beatles fan.
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It’s easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.
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When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones – everybody was writing their own songs. That’s the way that you established your own identity.
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It’s like this – these five members have been influenced of course by other groups, because that’s where this generation‘s groups came from – an environment like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and The Who. People like that.
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When punk came along, I found my generation‘s music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, ’cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, ‘This is it.’
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Downloadable music is the biggest musical phenomenon since the Beatles, and the music industry is slow to come to grips with that.
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I remember when I was younger I used to sing that Beatles song, ‘When I’m 64’, and think that’s light years away for me – I was 18 when it came out. Now here I am.
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No one person could have broken up a band, especially one the size of the Beatles.
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You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.
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I was such a massive fan of all the ’60s pop bands, but if I had to single out one band, it would definitely be The Beatles.
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If you look in my CD case, you’ll see it’s Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, now I can’t think of anyone else, but all that stuff.
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Being in The Beatles was a short, incredible period of my life. I had 22 years leading up to it, and it was all over eight years later.
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My first introduction to pop music was probably the Osmonds, the Jackson 5, the BeeGees… Then the Beatles eventually. My father was pretty specific about what we listened to early on.
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I wanted to pay tribute to my musical influences: Buffalo Springfield, Lightfoot, the Beatles, the Hollies.
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I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine‘ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
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If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it’s far better to give new records a try.
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I grew up with The Beatles, Bob Marley and Talking Heads. I like the melody-with-rhythm aspect of music – there’s so much to discover still.
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A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real good recording, a Beatles record, and there are so many good songs.
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Many people, especially young people, have started listening to sitar since George Harrison, one of the Beatles, became my disciple.
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I have a very eclectic iPod. So I’ve got my cardio people – so it’s anything from Beyonce to some Jay-Z to Janelle Monae, her song ‘Tightrope,’ that’s a good cardio song. And then I’ve got Sting. I’ve got Mary J. Blige. I’ve got The Beatles. I’ve got Michael Jackson. I try to pick the songs that I personally love.
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At the end of the Beatles, I really was done in for the first time in my life. Until then, I really was a kind of cocky sod.
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Probably my two biggest musical influences were the Everly Brothers and the Beatles, in chronological order. Both of them have had a very simple-sounding musical style that’s actually quite complex as far as popular songs are concerned.
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I’m more in the Stones camp than the Beatles camp.
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I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn’t one of them… I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.
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My dad bought a Beatles tape when I was in fifth grade, and that was the first time I ever really – I mean I was into music, but that was the first time it really blew my mind. When I heard the ‘Red Compilation,’ which wasn’t like a proper album, I thought, ‘music was more than I had ever thought it was before.’
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I don’t remember ‘Doctor Who‘ not being part of my life, and it became a part of growing up, along with The Beatles, National Health spectacles, and fog. And it runs deep. It’s in my DNA.
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In maybe 1963, we had ‘Collier’s Encyclopedia,’ and they sent us their yearly LP. I heard the Beatles talking on there. That was the first time I tried altering my voice, doing a Liverpudlian accent.
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Rolling Stones came later for me. I was a Beatles guy. All of us were pretty much more along the lines of Beatles guys than we were Stones or Elvis.
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I was a huge Beatles fan. The Stones, Dylan. Later on, I got into Stevie Wonder, and Bill Withers – he’s one of my heroes. Al Green, too.
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If I could be in any band, I think it would have to be The Beatles. That would have been a lot of fun.
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I just found out last week – my sister told me – that my father had some Beatles records. So I must have heard them quite a bit, but it never registered, really. Now I listen to them with new ears.
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I wasn’t a guy who grew up wanting to be in ‘Funny Girl,’ if you know what I mean. I wanted to be in the Beatles.
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Cole Archer’s Chillout Mix. That’s my son’s mix. He’s ten weeks old, and this is what he listens to: ‘Valerie’ by Amy Winehouse, ‘Everyday People‘ by Arrested Development, The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City.’
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Everybody can dig The Beatles, but why should everybody dig us?
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The only people playing the roles of classic rock stars are hip-hop artists, now. Kanye‘s stage persona, and the way he approaches making albums, and the way he wants to be better than everyone else? That’s reminiscent of Freddie Mercury. That’s reminiscent of the Beatles.
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I’ve bought clothes based on record covers. Particularly from the formative music that turned me onto it in the first place when I was a kid, with the Beatles and the Small Faces. A lot of those Sixties soul artists were in really sharp sharkskin or mohair suits, and Motown artists looked amazing.
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I fantasized that I went to art school with the Beatles.
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I respect my dad, and he’s amazing. He’s my hero. He’s the Beatles, man – or one of them.
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The Beatles are the classical music of rock n’ roll. And rock n’ roll is far more widespread than classical will ever be.
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Ringo isn’t the best drummer in the world. He isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles.
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India brings out so many different feelings in me. I’ve been fascinated with India and Indian culture as long as I can remember – ever since the ’60s with the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
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The Beatles in 1963 came to America and became international celebrities, but Bobby Fischer was one of the first, as Elvis was, more in terms of the message created around him.
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My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
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I think the people who are sitting in their living room doing those, ‘Let’s take country music back’ blogs and all that stuff, that’s crazy to me. No one’s saying that about rock & roll, and no one sounded like the Beatles since 1960. No one says that about R&B, and no one sounded like the Commodores since 1970.
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I’ve been a big Bob Marley fan forever. Forever. Like big, huge. Bob Marley and the Beatles, that’s my big, giant music influence. I can listen to them all the time.
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With an older generation, there’s some weight carried with the Beatles. There’s almost like an untouchable, god-like force field around them.
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I’ve never written to a band since the Beatles. Since the Dave Clark Five!
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As a kid, my parents would always listen to a lot of Beatles, Queen, Elvis. My mom was born and raised in Italy, and my dad was born in Canada and moved back and forth between Canada and Italy, so they would also listen to all the big Italian stars like Eros Ramazzotti, Gigi D’Alessio, Tiziano Ferro, Laura Pausini.
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Just about every rock band and every guitar player from 1964 to 1984. To me, that’s the golden period of rock. From the first Beatles album hitting America to the last Van Halen album with David Lee Roth. That’s where all my favorite rock exists.
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When people are recording, and they’re like, ‘I want to get the drum sound of the Beatles,’ I hate that.
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It’s funny because if you ever ask anyone in England to try and do a Beatles accent, no one knows what they really sound like. If you ask anyone in America, they would try and give it a go. English people just know their songs.
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One of my main problems with music is that the basic formula is always the same: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, chorus, chorus, end. One of the bands that changed that was The Beatles. If you listen to ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.’ It’s three verses, bridge, end.
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You’re not a baby boomer if you don’t have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.
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There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.
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We copied our hairstyle from Prince Charles, not the Beatles.
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Woody Allen movies are like Beatles songs. I can’t name my favorite without you immediately naming a better one.
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Some of the best art in the world is collaborative, a mix of voices that are stronger together than separate. Take the Beatles, for example. Or every great movie ever made. We like to say they’re the director‘s vision, but really, they’re huge collaborations between directors, writers, actors, even producers.
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I don’t know about friends, but what time I spent with The Beatles they were very courteous to me.
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I’m touched by the Beatles. I want some of the music I do to reflect that. Here I am. I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that. Here I am. I’m touched by Jon Hendricks. I want some of my music to reflect that. And when I write, you’re going to hear it.
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There’s no outdoing The Beatles.
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The Beatles are the most credible band in the history of music.
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I was lucky enough to see the Beatles play live.
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I don’t think anybody comes close to The Beatles, including Oasis.
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I grew up watching English films and listening to The Doors and The Beatles.
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It was great fun to hang around the Beatles. They had amazingly fast minds, and they were incredibly amusing and funny and witty. They were great. There was a very high energy surrounding them.
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My understanding of current music stopped in 2006, so I am continually inspired by music from the past. Three Dog Night, Harry Nilsson, Bob Dylan, Herman’s Hermits, Association, Eagles, Beatles, Stones, Turtles, Animals… this list goes on forever.
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I was so aware of the stage clothes versus the everyday-life clothes, and the extremeness of the stage clothes that my parents had designed. Even coming across my dad’s old Beatles suits from Savile Row and the history attached to them – the masculinity and simplicity compared to the ’70s glitz and glamour of Wings.
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I was still listening to the Beatles until I came here, you know.
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I got the idea of meditation from The Beatles. It was a fad, but I’ve found it beneficial in my crazy life.
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I love bands like Queen, Zeppelin, The Beatles.
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In terms of what influenced me, I grew up on The Beatles, and I always was struck by their dry British sense of humor.
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Just coming from a musical family, I was always surrounded by it. On the car rides to school, my mom loved playing A Tribe Called Quest and the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ and then my dad was listening to a lot of Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder.
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My favorite album would have to be something from The Beatles.
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We listened to a lot of Rolling Stones and Beatles records when we were recording. They were really good at not playing loud, but generating really big sounds out of everything.
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I tried to emulate my favourite guitar players, the old bluesmen like Blind Willie McTell and Big Bill Broonzy. I used to sit by the record player and copy Chuck Berry and the Beatles. You can never copy someone completely, so you end up developing your own style.
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I’m touched by rock n’ roll. I’m touched by the Beatles. I want some of the music I do to reflect that.
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I liked the Beatles because there was so much melody. Jimi Hendrix is still one of my heroes.
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I don’t listen to anybody’s full record anymore and when I did, I don’t think I listened to the whole record. I’m sorry, and I don’t care who it is, if it’s the Beatles, I can’t listen to an hour and a half of anybody straight so I guess that’s just my personal preference.
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I’m very influenced by the work of George Martin and the string arrangements that he did for the Beatles.
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All I can say is thank God my stepdaughter’s favourite band in the whole wide world is The Beatles. We do have dance parties to ‘Wannabe’ though.
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I never thought that I would share a hit parade with the Beatles.
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Without people like Dylan and the Beatles and people like Paul Simon, I think rock n’ roll would have died out like Dixieland jazz.
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I am a big Beatles fan. And, you know, unbeknownst to anyone, I used to be one. But I have no problems of putting titles and lines from other songs in my songs, because they’re great lines and great titles.
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My kids will come to me and ask me to listen to a ‘new sound’ they think they’ve discovered. One time it was the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday,’ and the new sound was four strings. All of a sudden the new generation discovers the string quartet!
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The Beatles did treat me as a member of the group. And that was a great honor, you know?
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I would love to say I grew up on 2Pac and The Beatles, but I didn’t.
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I think of talent as being God-given. I know that contradicts what a lot of people believe, but that’s how I see it. I think the Beatles were meant to be, you know? So when I listen to Paul McCartney, I think, ‘Here’s the person that God gave the gift of allowing him to write ‘Let It Be.’
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Before hip-hop existed, we were listening to soul songs from the ’70s. I grew up with Motown, Elton John, and the Beatles. To me, that’s good music.
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I think the Beatles is one band that, if I’m working on a song arrangement or if I have some idea for a song, and there’s a little bit of a Beatles quality to it, I never avoid that. I always will steer into it.
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As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles’ question, ‘Will you still need me when I’m 64?’
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Even at al my mother‘s concerts, I had never seen people go crazy the way they did with the Beatles.
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Between 1963 and 1975, I worked very little. The Beatles had come to New York and changed music – all the solo singers were out of work.
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People say the Beatles were John Lennon. What is Paul McCartney? Chopped liver? But everyone has their own favourite members whose creativity they gravitate to. That’s normal.
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You can’t beat The Beatles, you join ’em.
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The first time I heard The Beatles, I cried. It was ‘Let it Be’.
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When you think about great teams, The Beatles and the Pythons immediately spring to mind. The Pythons were as much a part of their time as The Beatles.
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The Beatles mean so much to so many people, you know? Everybody has at least one song of The Beatles that’s one of their favorite songs of all time.
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One day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them – and only them – until I was probably in high school.
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The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every Bollywood film ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine.
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When the Beatles cut old rock n’ roll, they were recording music still in their performing repertoire, and besides, they never thought of the music as old.
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The Beatles showed with ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ that you can make an album out of anything, just make it seem like it’s connected.
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I grew up listening to most of my parents’ music like The Beatles and ABBA and all that stuff.
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My mom and dad have two very different tastes in music, so they were playing everything from Prince to the Beatles to Aaliyah.
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I was wanting something new, and for me the Beatles were… outstanding. I was breathless, speechless.
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I didn’t know much about him, and I wasn’t a big country music fan. I listened to the Beatles and David Bowie, so I didn’t know a lot about him.
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The first year with the success that we had and let me point out that the time frame changes depending on which decade you look at it. In the seventies acts were kind of expected to do an album a year. If you look at the Beatles they were doing three a year.
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If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.
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Some people’s parents listened to the Beatles… but my family is Alquimia, Celia Cruz, and Carlos Vives – this old, rich Colombian music. I loved hearing that while I was growing up.
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I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.
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At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.
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I think the Beatles are a lot of people’s favorite band.
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I could hum Beatles songs before I could talk – not very well, but sort of.
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The Beatles kind of pervade everything. They’re always kind of part of everyone’s lives.
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Funny songs aren’t usually that good. Like Weird Al and maybe a couple of Beatles songs, but it’s kind of hard to bring humor into rock music in an interesting way.
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Haiti is my country. The same way the Beatles are received in England – that’s how Wyclef Jean is received in Haiti, do you know what I mean?
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I love that Euro-pop dance music, but with girl power. I also listen to Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. I have a Beatles song tattooed on my foot. I’m all over the place.
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I went from being a kid-kid, listen to everything from The Beatles through Kiss, Peter Frampton, Jethro Tull classic rock, classic stuff into immediately, it seemed like, Iron Maiden and stuff like that. The first Iron Maiden record and then, obviously, the first Metallica record.
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When the Beatles first came out, you had to go to a certain amount of trouble to have long hair. You just couldn’t have it immediately. Anything you can just go out and get – like platform shoes – is not going to inspire people as much as something they have to go through a little bit of hell to have.
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Well, the stuff that I liked growing up was AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, but I also liked the Beatles and guys like Cat Stevens and Elton John.
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I think the ’60s was a great time for music, especially for rock and roll. It was the era of The Beatles, of The Stones, and then later on The Who and Zeppelin. But at one point in the ’70s, it just kind of became… mellow.
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I like the Beatles, of course, but that’s when I grew up.
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One day, Travi$ is going to be moving like The Beatles.
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The Beatles were raw musically, but I think they really had something.
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A song is a song. But there are some songs, ah, some songs are the greatest. The Beatles song ‘Yesterday.’ Listen to the lyrics.
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Prior to ‘Insidious Chapter 3,’ I was happy to write movies for James Wan to direct as I felt very much that I was one half of a duo. I looked at us as a team who works together and I was happy to be part of that, I was happy to effectively be the bass player in The Beatles.
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As for the way we play, we are as much like the Beatles as any American Jazz group is like any other.
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The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector. Those were my idols.
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I’m just old enough to be able to say I got those very first Beatles records right as they were hitting America. My father brought them home. It was definitely the earliest musical influence on my life, and still one of the greatest.
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I knew The Beatles before because we did our first television with them, ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars.’
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It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!
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The Beatles are great for everybody – they write the songs that made the whole world sing.
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I really like The Beatles.
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I always liked that about bands like the Beatles. They could be so touching at one moment and then ‘Helter Skelter’ the next.
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It was only later that I found out there was good ’70s rock like the Raspberries and the Flaming Groovies. I always gravitated toward the ’60s music more, though, like the Kinks, the Who and the Beatles, of course.
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I love the Beatles.
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The reason I got into music was obviously because of bands like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, things like that.
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I grew up on oldies like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and The Who.
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With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I’d been born at the same time as John Lennon, I’d have been up there.
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While other girls swooned over The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I worshipped Rudolf Nureyev and Isadora Duncan.
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I think when I was a kid, and I was in England and it was all about The Stones, The Who, The Kinks and The Beatles and that’s what my dad was into.
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The Beatles and The Stones were basically inspired by American Rhythm and Blues.
335
Contrary to reports, this boy is not a billionaire or going to be richer than any Beatle… and not just in the sense of money, by the way; the Beatles are untouchable – those billionaire reports are a joke.
336
And my biggest revelation that will never be beaten is the Beatles. I couldn’t believe that I’d gone my whole life without knowing all those songs.
337
The Beatles were a huge influence on me to write really good melodies.
338
People listen to The Beatles, but while they were muscially influential, they weren’t culturally influential in quite the same way. You can go into the back of beyond in a little Indian village, and they will listen to Bob Marley. But they’re not going to be listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.
339
I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.
340
The Beatles once approached Stanley Kubrick to do ‘The Lord Of The Rings.’ This was before Tolkien sold the rights. They approached him, and he said, ‘No.’
341
I grew up listening to all kinds of music. When I came up, you would hear people like Marvin Gaye talking about Sarah Vaughan. You would go to a show and see Ella Fitzgerald performing the music of the Beatles.
342
I’m very lucky; I have a lot of knowledge. My favorite band is The Beatles, so a lot of inspiration for my music comes from them, too.
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Maybe ‘Can’t Stop Feeling’ and ‘Turn It On’ we’ll just release as singles. It’s a thing The Beatles used to do which I really loved, the idea of releasing something as a single completely on its own.
348
The music I listened to as a kid – the Stones, the Beatles – that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.
349
The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.
350
I ain’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I’ve dedicated my life to music since I was 7 and my dad bought me a guitar and the ‘Meet the Beatles’ album.
351
The Beatles will go on and on.
352
When I was a kid, and Elvis Presley broke through to a middle class, white audience, it was a sociological phenomenon that lasted through the Beatles and even a bit through Fleetwood Mac.
353
There are so many reasons to mark the passing of the great Joe Cocker – as many songs as he wrote, recorded and performed in his remarkable concerts. For me, Cocker was also the only performer who successfully covered and even improved on The Beatles.
354
I had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didn’t begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like ‘Hey Jude’ that I could appreciate. But they didn’t seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.
355
Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Dead, Zeppelin, the Beatles – I paint to this music all of the time.
356
I was singing totally jazz then, but when I heard the Beatles and heard the gospel influence and everything, I just said, ‘I can make jazz with R&B.’
357
My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains… it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.
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All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of what you call Beatles haircut. And my boyfriend then, Klaus Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart liked it very, very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and asking me to cut his hair for him.
360
When I was in school, the first song I learned was of Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. I couldn’t even pronounce their names but I was singing ‘Hello Darkness my old friend‘ and ‘Yellow Submarine.’
361
I don’t really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music.
362
My first band was an Argentinian folk group when I was 10. When I was 12 I had my electric guitar, and by the time I was 13, the Beatles came into the scene, and that was over. So I have a mixture of all these traditions, and I think that’s who I am, a mixture of everything.
363
All the best British groups were inspired by black American music. With The Beatles, it was Motown and the blues. With me, it was a mixture of British styles and the more sophisticated Seventies soul of Barry White and Marvin Gaye.
364
My house was full of music. My main memories are of the record player at home: it was all Beatles and Rolling Stones, and we danced around the living room; that started me off on instruments, and I’ve done nothing else ever since.
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If I were in the Beatles, I’d be a good George Harrison.
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Although the Beatles were big to the world, within the business, we’re all very, very equal.
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I was always introduced as the Beatles photographer and I gave it up in the end. I was so unsure of myself. Am I good or am I just the Beatles photographer? People were not interested in what I did before. I could not stand it any more.
372
The Beach Boys have always been a part of the ’60s spectrum, with The Beatles and that kind of thing. They were a part of the music business like everyone else. And they did quite well as a singing group, and I finished a lot of good records, and I’m very proud of them.
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When I heard The Beatles, that was my turning point. They were like my mentors. You know, the funny thing about that, when I heard ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ at first I said these guys are like a flash in the pan. But the second album, I had to take all that back. John Lennon – one of the greatest writers in the world.
375
When I got into the Beatles, I must have only been about six or seven but old enough to take notice. We used to have an old radiogram which, for readers of a certain age, was like a big cabinet thing with a record player inside it.
376
The Beatles are the ‘on switch’ to my life.
377
Even if you’re not a fan of the Beatles you just know their songs by default. I had probably got bored of the Beatles by the time I was like 15 because I thought I had heard enough.
378
To the best of my knowledge, none of the Beatles can read music.
379
Black people created rock music, it’s a fact. Black people created bluegrass and rock and roll way before Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
380
I always wanted to merge heavy metal with pop music, but I think that because I grew up more with pop, the Beatles and the Stones, I tended to affiliate myself with those projects.
381
You know, I was such a big Beatles fan, and when I’d buy a new album I’d invariably hate it the first time I heard it ’cause it was a mixture of absolute joy and absolute frustration. I couldn’t grasp what they’d done, and I’d hate myself for that.
382
I didn’t take that many pictures of The Beatles, but I did photograph them before anybody else knew about them, and that makes me proud. I saw something in them.
383
The similarity between my music and The Beatles’ music is it has within it a very positive quality. It’s woven with humor.
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‘The White Album’ is so cool because it was around the time when the Beatles started to not like each other, so they would each go off and do their own thing. It’s all over the place, but that’s what makes the album so brilliant.
386
I have been influenced by many different artists at many different stages of my life. Starting out, it was people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Fiona Apple. As I got older I got deeper into the work of bands like the Beatles, artists like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Etta James, and Joni Mitchell.
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The first songs I learned was ‘Crazy’ by Patsy Cline and ‘At Last’ by Etta James. I had been growing up with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, great bands.
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I listen to a lot of Beatles. I have a very specific Beatles discography that I go to.
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The Beatles never sounded intimidated by their idols. They never interpreted old rock; they simply played it as well and as joyfully as they knew how. On ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ John Lennon does nothing but interpret old rock.
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I was 16 when I started playing. I borrowed a friend’s acoustic guitar, and I had a Beatles chord book. I just taught myself that way.
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Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’ That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’
396
I honestly grew up listening to the Stones more. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love the Beatles.
397
I could be just as happy playing a Beatles song as I am when I’m thrashing out the double bass stuff with Adrenaline Mob.
398
I love Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Brandi, Sade, Nat King Cole. I like the Beatles. I listen to a lot of that.
399
The Beatles changed everything . I knew I couldn’t compete, couldn’t be as cool, so I went completely the other way.
400
The Roses should have made it as the biggest band since The Beatles, but we didn’t.
401
Before the Beatles could give us ‘The White Album’, they had to achieve disorienting success.
402
My first two records were influenced by the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
403
The Beatles were basically a vocal band.
404
It was an experience being on a Beatles tour. They weren’t very good. The singing was great, but the playing was a bit weak.
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I think that one of the nice things about the Yellow Submarine movie is that it seems to be perennial. People enjoy watching from each generation. And it was like the Beatles themselves. You know the Beatles seem to find new audience each time another generation comes along.
407
When I was growing up, the people who liked the Beatles, I didn’t like, so I didn’t pay attention to them.
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I don’t know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that’s on a t-shirt, I probably won’t know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don’t know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria.
411
From 1958 to 1964, that’s real rock n’ roll. Then the Beatles hit and everyone sounded like them.
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I feel enormously privileged to be part of the generation that witnessed the magic of the Beatles first hand, and I think ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ connected with my four-year-old self because it was the whole package: an album and a movie.
414
I do have a vague recollection of reviving the cover of The Beatles’ ‘Every Little Thing,’ but I don’t know if that was just our riffing on it in rehearsal. I don’t think we ever did it actually in the show.
415
There are a lot of famous comedians from Liverpool, then obviously the Beatles, and the football club. That’s what people in Liverpool are passionate about.
416
The Beatles had just come out, and everybody had a band. It was incredible competition out there.
417
Growing up in the neighborhoods I did in Oakland, you don’t know the Beatles, but I started learning their songs.
418
You look back at people like Elvis and The Beatles and still get their music because it’s timeless. That’s what I want.
419
I listen to everything: The Pixies, The Beatles, The Avett Brothers.
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By 1968, both The Beatles and The Beach Boys had plenty of fame – we were looking for something deeper. The Maharishi taught us how to go beyond thinking and action in order to grow from within.
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It was a free-for-all; the BBC wouldn’t play anything so we had pirate radio playing the African-American music and the Beatles and greats like Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson and Motown’s Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Otis Redding.
425
The most important thing I gave the Beatles was my friendship. They trusted me: there was no fear in being photographed.
426
My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs – it was popular in the 60s. So we had all that at home.
427
Before the Beatles, America was musically a very conservative country. You can see film footage of people at a baseball game, they all had hats and ties on, and the women were dressed up like they were going to church. That was the America that I started getting interested in musically.
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I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.
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