One Fateful Encounter
A couple of guitarists meet, and the rest is music history
On July 6, 1957, "Yesterday" was still well into tomorrow. But when two British teenagers met on that warm summer day, the future of popular music was irrevocably changed. The encounter was all the more momentous because it almost never happened.
Paul McCartney, a promising guitarist, then 15, was reluctant when his schoolmate Ivan Vaughn urged him to come to a church festival in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. But Vaughn convinced him it was a great place to meet girls. He also had an ulterior motive: The Quarrymen, a band fronted by another friend, John Lennon, would be playing, and he thought the two musicians might hit it off.
At first, Vaughn feared he had made a mistake. The meeting, during a music break, consisted mostly of wary nods. Few words were spoken, no handshakes were exchanged. McCartney recalled in a later interview that Lennon, then 16, had been drinking. "He was a little afternoon-pissed, leaning over my shoulder breathing boozily."
Improvising. But McCartney was impressed with Lennon's rendition of the Del Vikings' "Come Go With Me." He particularly liked the way Lennon made up lyrics when he didn't know the correct ones. Later, McCartney auditioned, doing a 10-minute medley of Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent. Now it was Lennon's turn to be impressed. He muttered to himself, "f--- me," and later said McCartney had a "great set of pipes." McCartney was invited to join the band a couple of days later.
When other members of the Quarry men dropped out, McCartney's friend George Harrison joined up, and the nucleus of the future Beatles was forged. Lennon and McCartney, jointly or individually, would go on to write most of the Beatles' songs. And they emerged as the band's leaders—Lennon the resident radical and acerbic wit, McCartney the tunesmith with the penchant for romanticism.
The two were always competitive, but in the Beatles' last years, the rivalry became even nastier. The sourness that followed the band's breakup eventually faded, however, and the two renewed their friendship well before Dec. 8, 1980, when Lennon was fatally shot by a deranged fan.
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