July 6 - McCartney and Lennon

On July 6, 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney met a fellow novice guitar player named John Lennon, age 17, who was the leader of a skiffle and rock-and-roll band called The Quarrymen he had put together the year before in Liverpool, England. The band was playing a gig at a church garden fête, and McCartney demonstrated to Lennon how he tuned his guitar (which he played left-handed), then he sang a few songs, including a Little Richard medley. The band invited McCartney to join soon afterward as a rhythm guitarist. In August 1960 the band renamed itself the Beatles. Exactly seven years after this meeting, on July 6, 1964, the Beatles’ first movie, “A Hard Day’s Night,” premiered in London at the frenzied onset of what had become “Beatlemania.” Filmed in black-and-white and loaded with 10 hit songs, it was an unashamed exploitation movie designed to cash in on a musical craze, but it received mostly positive reviews. It has since been praised by film critic Roger Ebert, who called it "one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies."