FAMOUS FANS REMEMBER
Grammy Award–winning musician Billy Joel: [After seeing the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964] That one performance changed my life.… I’d never considered playing rock [music] as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn’t look like they’d come out of the Hollywood star mill…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.”
Sting, lead singer, the Police: 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.
We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on, and eight of the Top 10 songs were Beatles songs…“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” all those early ones. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies
