The Beatles defined their own sense of values and honor. They took stances without ever being politically correct. And they did it all with incredible humor… I honestly think that there are certain things in life that help people understand themselves. I think the Beatles are one of those things. They resonate the journey of true selfhood, really.”
— Sophie B. Hawkins
“The Beatles – Paul, John, George and Ringo – have done more for the fall of Communism than any other western institution.”
— Artemy Troitsky
“I love the Beatles. What more can I say? I’m not gonna lie to you. I love ’em. They make me happy. And I think they were the best, and still are.”
— Liam Gallagher
“Although their initial style was a highly original synthesis of early American rock and roll and R&B, the Beatles spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock’s stylistic frontiers, consistently staking out new musical territory on each release. The band’s increasingly sophisticated output encompassed a variety of genres … without sacrificing the effortless mass appeal of their early work.”
— Andy Schwartz – Icons of Rock ( Schinder / Schwartz )
“There is no way I’d be doing what I do now if it wasn’t for the Beatles. I was watching ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ and I saw them. Those skinny little boys, kind of androgynous, with long hair like girls. It blew me away that these four boys [from] the middle of nowhere could make that music.
—Gene Simmons, Kiss
“I declare that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”
— Timothy Leary
“I don’t think anybody comes close to The Beatles, including Oasis.”
— Brian May of Queen
“Paul and George would come from next door in their school uniforms and all they could talk about was chords and guitars and music. They were sitting around this pile of chips and they’d start playing and strumming, and I would sit down and the hairs would stand up on the back of my neck when I heard the voices – the three of them, you know, at the age of 16, 17, 18. It was amazing!”
— Cynthia Lennon
“That’s my No. 1 biggest influence. If you’re a rock musician and you say you don’t like The Beatles, then you’re a jerk. You’re just trying to be cool, but you’re really not. You can’t deny The Beatles.”
— Jana Peri
The Greatest Band To Ever Walk The Earth!”
— Ozzy Osbourne
“The greatest rock band ever, ever! They built a great reservoir of melody and poetry which we’re still drawing on today.”
— Victor Spinetti
“The night The Beatles first played The Ed Sullivan Show, boy, that was something. Seeing them on TV was akin to a national holiday. Talk about an event. I never saw guys looking so cool. I had already heard some of their songs on the radio, but I wasn’t prepared by how powerful and totally mesmerizing they were to watch. It changed me completely. I knew something was different in the world that night.”
—Joe Perry, Aerosmith
“This was different, shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material … Rock ‘n’ roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out … and opened up a whole world of possibilities.”
—Bruce Springsteen
“One of my earliest memories was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room of the house I grew up in and looking up at the black-and-white TV set and watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was five years old and I remember thinking, ‘Wow! That’s what I want to do.’ I know it sounds absurd — most five-year-old boys say they want to be firemen or policemen or baseball players, or even the president. Not me. I wanted to be one of the Beatles.
—Richie Sambora, Bon Jovi
“It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing … My whole life changed in a couple of minutes!
All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.”
— Astrid Kirchherr on meeting the pre-fame Beatles
“The Beatles were formative in my upbringing, my education. They came from a very similar background: the industrial towns in England, working class; they wrote their own songs, conquered the world. That was the blueprint for lots of other British kids to try to do the same.”
— Sting
“I remember exactly where I was sitting. It was amazing. It was like the axis shifted … It was kind of like an alien invasion.”
—Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders
“My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each others negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum parts. And that’s how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”
— Steve Jobs / Apple Computer
“It’s nearly impossible to overstate the magnitude of the Beatles’ influence – not just on music, but upon virtually every aspect of popular culture … the Fab Four revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music … Their initial impact would have been enough to establish the Beatles as one of their era’s most influential cultural forces, but they didn’t stop there.”
— Scott Schinder – Icons of Rock ( Schinder / Schwartz )
“Artists who broke through the constraints of their time period to come up with something that was unique and original … in the form of popular music, no one will ever be more revolutionary, more creative and more distinctive. They not only sparked the British Invasion of the US, they became a globally influential phenomenon as well.”
— Robert Greenfield ( former Rolling Stone associate editor )
“Lennon and McCartney were superb composers – their songs were brilliant and remain brilliant.”
— Martin Goldsmith, author
“We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on, and eight of the Top 10 songs were Beatles songs…’I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ all those early ones. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid… I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
— Bob Dylan
“After the Ed Sullivan Show, Feb. 9, 1964, at approx. 8:04pm [laughs], after that moment every album, every guitar, evey set of drums that was ever sold … 10% should have gone right into their pocket!”
— George Thorogood
“The minute I saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show — and it’s true of thousands of guys — there was the way out. There was the way to do it. You get your friends and you’re a self-contained unit. And you make the music. And it looked like so much fun. It was something I identified with. I had never been hugely into sports. … I had been a big fan of Elvis. But I really saw in The Beatles that here’s something I could do. I knew I could do it. It wasn’t long before there were groups springing up in garages all over the place. ”
—Tom Petty
“That one performance changed my life … Up to that moment I’d never considered playing rock as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn’t look like they’d come out of the Hollywood star mill, who played their own songs and instruments, and especially because you could see this look in John Lennon’s face — and he looked like he was always saying: ‘F— you!’ — I said: ‘I know these guys, I can relate to these guys, I am these guys.’ This is what I’m going to do — play in a rock band’.”
—Billy Joel
“A big influence was seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They were a quartet and we said, wow, we can do that. If these guys from England can come out and play rock ‘n’ roll, we can do it … We bought Beatle wigs. We went to the drama store, and I guess they were Three Stooges wigs at that time.”
—Doug Clifford, Creedence Clearwater Revival
“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“What kept the Beatles head and shoulders above everyone else is that they were prepared to change, do different things. No one record was a carbon copy of another. We never fell into the Star Wars II syndrome, remaking something under a new title.”
— George Martin
“Over 55,000 people saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium. We took $304,000 – the greatest gross ever in the history of show business!”
— Sid Bernstein
“The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me the first time we saw the Beatles on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ … There’d been so much anticipation and hype about the Beatles that it was a huge event, like the lunar landing: that was the moment Ann and I heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight at the time. … Right away, we started doing air guitar shows in the living room, faking English accents, and studying all the fanzines.”
—Nancy Wilson, Heart
I was top of the bill and wearing a white suit. The boys [the Flamingos] are wearing purple suits. We’re doing The Shadows and all that and the girls are screaming. These guys came walking in, they all had leather and black polo necks and John Lennon had big rips in his jeans. I thought, good God, what’s this? They’re going to ruin everything – the state of them! John Lennon hit his amplifier with a hammer, Paul put on a solid red Rosetti guitar with three strings on it, not even plugged in.
No stage clothes, just this scruffy, stinky, smelly group. All of a sudden I heard this voice, ‘Oh, my soul! Baby, baby, baby.’ Paul just ripped it out. My fans came screaming from one end of Litherland town hall [Merseyside, England] to the other to watch them. Usually all the girls tried to talk to me, but I was completely ignored! Beatles, oh man, I was sick.”
— Faron Ruffley (Faron’s Flamingos)
“Don’t you think that the Beatles gave every sodden thing they’ve got to be the Beatles? That took a whole section of our youth – that whole period – when everybody else was just goofin’ off we were workin’ 24 hours a day!”
— John Lennon
“The Beatles saved the world from boredom.”
— George Harrison
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