Lennon

100 Greatest Britons
100 Greatest Britons was broadcast in 2002 by the BBC. The programme was the result of a vote conducted to determine whom the United Kingdom public considers the greatest British people in history. The series, Great Britons, included individual programmes on the top ten, with viewers having further opportunities to vote after each programme. It concluded with a debate. All of the top 10 were dead by the year of broadcast.
The poll resulted in candidates including Guy Fawkes, who was executed for trying to blow up the Parliament of England; Oliver Cromwell who created a republican England; Richard III, suspected of murdering his nephews; James Connolly, an Irish nationalist and socialist who was executed by the Crown in 1916; and a surprisingly high ranking of 17th for the former Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em star Michael Crawford. In addition to the Britons, some notable non-British entrants were listed, including two Irish nationals, the philanthropic musicians Bono and Bob Geldof. Furthermore, many candidates were from an era in which Britishness did not exist. The top 19 entries were people of English origin (though Sir Ernest Shackleton and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, were both born into Anglo-Irish families when what is now the Republic of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom). The highest-placed Scottish entry was Alexander Fleming in 20th place, with the highest Welsh entry, Owain Glyndŵr, at number 23. Sixty had lived in the twentieth century. The highest-ranked living person was Margaret Thatcher, who placed 16th.Ringo Starr is the only member of The Beatles not on the list.

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Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies").
Hoffman was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting to riot as a result of his role in protests that led to violent confrontations with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, along with Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale. The group was known collectively as the "Chicago Eight"; when Seale's prosecution was separated from the others, they became known as the Chicago Seven. While the defendants were initially convicted of intent to incite a riot, the verdicts were overturned on appeal.
Hoffman came to prominence in the 1960s, and continued practicing his activism in the 1970s, and has remained a symbol of the youth rebellion of that era.

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Adam Clayton
Adam Charles Clayton (born 13 March 1960) is a musician, best known as the bassist of the Irish rock band U2. Clayton has resided in County Dublin since the time his family moved to Malahide when he was five years old in 1965. Clayton is well known for his bass playing on songs such as "New Year's Day", "Bullet the Blue Sky", "With or Without You", "Mysterious Ways", "Get on Your Boots", and "Magnificent". His work on No Line on the Horizon has been cited as his best bass playing. He has worked on several solo projects throughout his career, such as his work with fellow band member Larry Mullen Jr. on the theme of 1996's Mission: Impossible. Clayton, as a part of U2, has won 22 Grammy awards.
Clayton is the elder child of Brian and Jo Clayton, born on 13 March 1960 in Chinnor, Oxfordshire, England. When Clayton was five years old, his family moved from Oxfordshire to Malahide, County Dublin, where Clayton's brother Sebastian was born. The Clayton family became friends with the Evans family, with their sons Dik and Dave (more commonly known as The Edge), who were both in the original group, Feedback, that spawned U2.

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Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy is an African-American playwright and was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is best known for her first major play Funnyhouse of a Negro. Many of Kennedy's plays explore issues of race, kinship, and violence in American society, and many of her works are "autobiographically inspired." In 1995, critic Michael Feingold of the Village Voice declared that "with Beckett gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater."
Kennedy is noted for the use of surrealism in her plays. Her plays are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical and imaginary figures to depict and explore the American experience.New York Times critic Clive Barnes noted that "While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism--LeRoi Jones and Ed Bullins at times have something different going but even their symbolism is straightforward stuff–-Miss Kennedy is weaving some kind of dramatic fabric of poetry."

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Alan W. Pollack
Alan W. Pollack is a musicologist. He is best known for having musically analysed every Beatles song released. He started the task in 1989 and finished in 2000, with 187 original songs and 25 cover songs. The analyses have come to be known as the "Notes on..." Series, as each is entitled "Notes on Love Me Do", "Notes on Help!" and so on. The notes were released weekly, usually on Wednesdays, on the rec.music.beatles usenet group.
Pollack holds a B.A. in Music from Brooklyn College and both an M.A. and PhD from University of Pennsylvania in Music Theory and Composition. He was an instructor of music theory and composition at Yale University from 1975 - 1977. Since 1979 he has pursued a career in software engineering.

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Alfred Lennon
Alfred "Alf" Lennon (14 December 1912 – 1 April 1976) was the father of English musician John Lennon. He spent many years in an orphanage—with his sister, Edith—after his father died. He was known as being very witty and musical throughout his life—he sang and played the banjo—but not as being very dependable. Although always known as Alf by his family, he later released a record as Freddie Lennon, and was quoted in newspapers under that name.
He married Julia Stanley in 1938. John was their only child together, but as Alf was often away at sea during World War II, he did not see much of his child during his infancy. During this period, Julia became pregnant with another man's child. He offered to look after his wife, their child and the expected baby, but Julia rejected the idea. He had very little contact with his son until Beatlemania, when they met again, but later had only intermittent contact with each other. He died in Brighton, where he had gone to live after marrying 19-year-old Pauline Jones.

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Alistair Taylor
James Alistair Taylor (21 June 1935 in Runcorn – 9 June 2004 in Chesterfield) was the English personal assistant of Brian Epstein who accompanied him to the Cavern Club when he first saw The Beatles play on 9 November 1961. Taylor later became General Manager of Apple Corps for a short period.
Born in Runcorn, Taylor did his National Service in the Royal Air Force and worked in a series of jobs as a mover, timber importer and docker in the Liverpool Docks, before being successfully interviewed by Brian Epstein for a salesman job at North End Music Stores (NEMS). Brian liked him so much that he decided to offer him a job as his personal assistant in the shop.
Taylor said he invented the name of Raymond Jones to order Tony Sheridan’s album, which featured backing music by the Beatles, because he thought NEMS was losing sales by not stocking the disc:
Taylor's claim is in some doubt, as NEMS and Epstein communicated with a real Raymond Jones to acknowledge their debt once the Beatles became famous.

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Allan Williams
Allan Richard Williams (born 17 March 1930 in Bootle, Liverpool) is a former businessman and promoter of Welsh descent. He was the original booking agent and first manager of The Beatles. He personally took the young band to Hamburg, Germany, where they gained the vital show business experience that led to their emergence on the world stage.
In 1957 Williams leased a former watch-repair shop at 21 Slater Street, Liverpool, which he converted into a coffee bar. He named the venue the Jacaranda, after an exotic species of ornamental flowering tree, jacaranda mimosifolia. The Jac (as it became known) opened in September 1958. The Beatles were frequent customers, with John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe attending Liverpool Art College nearby, and Paul McCartney at Liverpool Institute adjacent to the college. Asking for the chance to play the club, Williams instead put them to work redecorating, with Lennon and Sutcliffe painting a mural for the Ladies room. Finally, the Beatles began playing at the Jac on occasion. Between May and August 1960, Williams secured a number of bookings for the group at other places. (Scott Wheeler: Charlie Lennon: Uncle To A Beatle. Boulder, Colorado: Outskirts Press, 2005.) One was backing a local stripper; when she discovered the Beatles were not familiar with the "Gypsy Fire Dance", they instead backed her with a rendition of the Harry Lime theme tune.

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Allen Klein
Allen Klein (December 18, 1931 – July 4, 2009) was an American businessman, talent agent and record label executive. His clients included The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Allen Klein was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish immigrants from Budapest, Hungary. His father was a butcher by trade, and his mother died before his first birthday. As a teenager, he worked in several jobs while attending evening classes. He excelled at mental arithmetic, and graduated from Upsala College, East Orange, New Jersey, in 1956.
He undertook bookkeeping for several people in showbusiness, and audited record companies. In 1957 he began his own business, a partnership with his wife Betty. Record industry insiders began to fear his blunt-speaking tenacity, and well-placed people began to recommend him. Klein regarded himself as a shrewd and tenacious businessman, exampled by him having a modified Bible quote on his desk, reading: "Though I walk in the shadow of the valley of evil, I have no fear, as I am the biggest bastard in the valley."

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Andy White (drummer)
Andrew "Andy" White (born 1930) is a Scottish drummer, best known for replacing Ringo Starr on drums on The Beatles' first single, "Love Me Do". White featured on the American 7" single release of the song, which also appeared on the band's debut British album, Please Please Me. He also played drums on the "Love Me Do" single B-side, "P.S. I Love You".
White has played with many other prominent musicians and groups, including Chuck Berry, Billy Fury, Herman's Hermits and Tom Jones. Allmusic called White "one of the busier drummers in England from the late '50s through the mid-'70s".
Andy White was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1930, the son of a baker. At the age of 12, he started playing drums in a pipe band, and became a professional session musician at the age of 17. In the 1950s and early 1960s, White played drums with a number of swing and traditional jazz groups and musicians. In 1958 he formed a big band jazz outfit and took it to the American Northeast where he backed "rockers" like Chuck Berry, The Platters and Bill Haley & His Comets. White said, "We used some big band arrangements and put a back beat to it to fit in with the rock 'n' roll thing. I got the chance to hear rock 'n' roll in the flesh. That was where I got a good idea about what it was supposed to happen, drumwise." In 1960 in London White recorded with Billy Fury on Fury's first album, The Sound of Fury, which is generally regarded as Britain's first rock and roll album.

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Anthony Newley
Anthony George Newley (24 September 1931 – 14 April 1999) was an English actor, singer and songwriter. He enjoyed success as a performer in such diverse fields as rock and roll and stage and screen acting.
Newley was born in the London working class district of Hackney, the son of Frances Grace Newley and George Kirby, a shipping clerk. He had 5 siblings, Maxene (b. 1926), John (b. 1927), Joanne (1928–1965), Linda (b. 1929), Belinda (b. 1932). He was Jewish on his mother's side. His parents, who had never married, separated during his early childhood, and he was brought up by his single mother.
Although recognised as very bright by his teachers back in London, he was uninterested in school, and by the age of fourteen was working as an office boy for an insurance company. When he read an ad in the Daily Telegraph, headed "Boy Actors Urgently Wanted" he applied to the advertisers, the prestigious Italia Conti Stage School, only to discover that the fees were too high. Nevertheless, after a brief audition, he was offered a job as an office boy on a salary of 30 shillings (£1.50) a week plus tuition at the school. While serving tea one afternoon he caught the eye of producer Geoffrey de Barkus, who cast Newley as "Dusty" in the children's serial, The Adventures of Dusty Bates.^{[citation needed]}

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Arthur Janov
Arthur Janov (born August 21, 1924) is an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and the creator of primal therapy, a treatment for mental illness that involves repeatedly descending into, feeling, and expressing long-repressed childhood pain. Janov directs a psychotherapy institute called the Primal Center in Santa Monica, California. Janov is the author of many books, most notably The Primal Scream.
Arthur Janov was born in Los Angeles. Janov received his B.A. and M.S.W. in psychiatric social work from the University of California, Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in psychology from Claremont Graduate School in 1960. Janov originally practiced conventional psychotherapy in his native California. He did an internship at the Hacker Psychiatric Clinic in Beverly Hills, worked for the Veterans’ Administration at Brentwood Neuropsychiatric Hospital and has been in private practice since 1952. He was also on the staff of the Psychiatric Department at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital where he was involved in developing their psychosomatic unit.

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Astrid Kirchherr
Astrid Kirchherr (born 20 May 1938), is a German photographer and artist and is well known for her association with The Beatles (along with her friends Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer), and her photographs of The Beatles during their Hamburg days: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best.
Kirchherr met artist Sutcliffe in the Kaiserkeller bar in Hamburg in 1960, where he was playing bass with The Beatles, and was later engaged to him, before his death in 1962. Although Kirchherr has taken very few photographs since 1967, her early work has been exhibited in Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Vienna, and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. She has published three limited-edition books of photographs.
Astrid Kirchherr was born in 1938 in Hamburg, Germany, and is the daughter of a former executive of the German branch of the Ford Motor Company. During World War II she was evacuated to the safety of the Baltic Sea where she remembered seeing dead bodies on the shore (after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland had been bombed and sunk), and the destruction in Hamburg when she returned.

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Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.

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Barry Miles
Barry Miles (or "Miles", born 1943, Cirencester, England) is an English author known for his participation in and writing on the subject of the 1960s London underground. He has written numerous books and his work has also regularly appeared in left-wing papers such as The Guardian. In the 1960s, he was co-owner of the Indica Gallery and helped start the independent newspaper International Times.
In the 1960s, Miles worked at Better Books, which was managed by Tony Godwin. Godwin was friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti with whom he would exchange Penguin books for City Lights publications. In 1965 Allen Ginsberg gave a reading at Better Books which led to the International Poetry Incarnation, a seminal event that was co-organised by Miles.
In 1965 Miles and his wife, the former Susan Crane, introduced McCartney to hash brownies by using a recipe for hash fudge which they had found in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.
Following the International Poetry Incarnation, Miles established the Indica Gallery and Bookshop, allowing him to meet many of the stars of the Swinging London social scene. Miles brought Paul McCartney into contact with people who wanted to start the International Times, which McCartney helped to fund.

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Bert Kaempfert
Bert Kaempfert (born Berthold Kämpfert; 16 October 1923 – 21 June 1980) was a German orchestra leader and songwriter. He made easy listening and jazz-oriented records, and wrote the music for a number of well-known songs, such as Strangers in the Night and Spanish Eyes.
He was born in Hamburg, Germany - where he received his lifelong nickname, Fips - and studied at the School of Music there. A multi-instrumentalist, he was hired by Hans Busch to play with his orchestra before serving as a bandsman in the German Navy during World War II. He later formed his own big band, toured with them, then worked as an arranger and producer, making hit records with Freddy Quinn and Ivo Robić. In 1961, he hired The Beatles to back Tony Sheridan for an album called My Bonnie. The album and its singles, released by Polydor, were the Beatles' first commercially released recordings.
Kaempfert's own first hit with his orchestra had been in 1960, with Wonderland by Night. Many of his tunes became better known as hits for other artists:

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Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Many of his policies have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance.
Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton became both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009 and was a Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state's education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.

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Bill Harry
Bill Harry (born in Liverpool, England) is the creator of Mersey Beat, an important newspaper of the early 1960s, which focused on the Liverpool music scene. Harry had started various magazines and newspapers before attending the Liverpool College of Art, with fellow students John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, who both later performed with The Beatles.
Harry met his wife-to-be, Virginia, at the Jacaranda club (managed by Allan Williams, the first manager of The Beatles) and she later agreed to help him start a music newspaper. After borrowing £50, Harry released the first issue of Mersey Beat on 6 July 1961, with the first 5,000 copies selling out within a short time. Harry arranged for the future Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, to see them perform a lunchtime concert at The Cavern Club on 9 November 1961. Epstein subsequently asked Harry create a national music paper, the Music Echo, but after problems with Epstein about editorial control, he decided to become a P.R.; working for many solo artistes and groups.

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Billy Joel
William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.
Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.

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Billy Preston
William Everett "Billy" Preston (September 2, 1946 – June 6, 2006) was a musician whose work included R&B, rock, soul, funk and gospel. Preston became famous, first as a session musician with such artists as Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and The Beatles, and was later successful as a solo artist with such hit pop singles as "Space Race", "Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing from Nothing", and a string of albums.
Alongside Tony Sheridan, Billy Preston was the only other musician to be credited on a Beatles recording after he was credited on the group's number-one hit, "Get Back", with the record title listed as The Beatles with Billy Preston. Steven Stills asked Preston if he could use Preston's phrase "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" in a song and created the legendary eponymous hit.
William Everett Preston was born on September 2, 1946 in Houston, Texas. At the age of three, the family moved to Los Angeles where Preston began playing piano while sitting on his mother Robbie's lap. Noted as a child prodigy, by the age of ten, Preston was playing organ onstage backing several gospel singers such as Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and Andrae Crouch. At twelve, he appeared in the W.C. Handy biopic starring Nat King Cole entitled, St. Louis Blues, playing W.C. Handy at a younger age. A year prior, Preston appeared on Cole's national TV show singing the Fats Domino hit, "Blueberry Hill".

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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (

/ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.

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Bob Newhart
George Robert "Bob" Newhart (born September 5, 1929), is an American stand-up comedian and actor. Noted for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery, Newhart came to prominence in the 1960s when his album of comedic monologues The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was a worldwide bestseller and reached #1 on the Billboard pop music charts—it remains the 20th best-selling comedy album in history. The follow-up album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! was also a massive success, and both albums held the Billboard #1 and #2 spots simultaneously, a feat unequaled until the 1991 release of Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II by hard rock band Guns N' Roses.
Newhart later went into acting, starring in two long-running and prize-winning situation comedies, first as psychologist Dr. Robert "Bob" Hartley on the 1970s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show and then as innkeeper Dick Loudon on the 1980s sitcom Newhart. He also had a third, short-lived sitcom in the nineties titled Bob. Newhart also appeared in film roles such as Major Major in Catch-22, and Papa Elf in Elf. He provided the voice of Bernard in the Walt Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. One of his most recent roles is the library head Judson in The Librarian. In 2011, Newhart appeared in the film Horrible Bosses.

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Bob Seger
Robert Clark "Bob" Seger (born May 6, 1945) is an American rock and roll singer-songwriter, guitarist and pianist.
As a locally successful Detroit-area artist, he performed and recorded as Bob Seger and the Last Heard and Bob Seger System throughout the 1960s. By the early 1970s, he had dropped the "System" from his recordings, and he continued to strive for broader success with other various bands. In 1973, he put together The Silver Bullet Band, an evolving group of Detroit-area musicians, with whom he became most successful. In 1976, he achieved a national breakout with the album Night Moves. On his studio albums, he also worked extensively with the Alabama-based Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which appeared on several of Seger's best-selling singles and albums.
A roots rocker with a classic raspy, shouting voice, Seger wrote and recorded songs that dealt with blue-collar themes and was an exemplar of heartland rock. Seger has recorded many hits, including "Night Moves", "Turn the Page", "We've Got Tonight", "Against the Wind", and "Like a Rock", and also co-wrote the Eagles' number-one hit "Heartache Tonight". His iconic recording of "Old Time Rock and Roll" was named one of the Songs of the Century in 2001.

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Bob Spitz
Bob Spitz is an American journalist and author best known for his celebrity biographies, including the New York Times best seller The Beatles: The Biography.
Articles by Spitz appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, Men's Journal, In Style, Esquire and The Washington Post. He currently lives in Connecticut.

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Bobby Kimball
Robert Troy "Bobby" Kimball (born March 29, 1947) is an American singer, best known as the longtime frontman of the rock band Toto.
Robert (Bobby) Troy Kimball was born in Orange, Texas, and was raised in nearby Vinton, Louisiana, as Vinton did not have a hospital (thus, he was born across the state line). Kimball started singing as a child, dabbling on voice and piano in a musical household throughout his youth. Throughout the 1970s, Kimball performed as a vocalist in various New Orleans area bands, including The Levee Band, which would later become Le Roux after Kimball left. In 1976, Kimball joined S.S. Fools in which he was the lead vocalist as well as keyboard player. That same year, the band released their self-titled album. The band broke up during its first tour.
In 1974, Bobby Kimball left Louisiana and moved to Los Angeles where he joined 3 members from the defunct band, Three Dog Night, to form a new band called S.S. Fools. They released one album on CBS Records, but the band split up within a year and a half. About 6 months later, Kimball was asked by David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, the two initial founding members of Toto, to join the five session musicians to form Toto. He submitted a self-penned audition song for the band, "You are the Flower", which was included on their debut album. Kimball performed on the first four studio albums by Toto. He was asked to leave Toto in 1984 during the sessions for Isolation due to tensions with other band members that included widespread drug abuse.

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Bobby Russell
Bobby Russell (19 April 1940, Nashville, Tennessee — 19 November 1992) was an American singer and songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973, he charted five singles on the Hot Country Songs charts, including the crossover pop hit "Saturday Morning Confusion." Russell was also married to singer and actress Vicki Lawrence from 1972 to 1974.

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Bobby Seale
Robert George "Bobby" Seale (born October 22, 1936), is an activist. He is known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton.
Seale was one of the three children born to his mother, a homemaker, and his father, a carpenter, in Dallas, Texas. After moving around in Texas, his family relocated to Oakland, California during World War II. Seale attended Berkeley High School, and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1955. He spent three years in the Air Force before he received a bad conduct discharge for fighting with a commanding officer. Upon his arrival back in Oakland, Seale began working at different aerospace plants as a sheet metal mechanic, and attending night school to earn his high school diploma.
In 1962, at the age of 25, Seale began attending Merritt College, a community college located on what was then Grove Street, now Martin Luther King Jr Way, near the Berkeley city-limits. There he would join the Afro-American Association, (AAA) and met Huey Newton, with whom he later co-founded the Black Panther Party. Seale and co-founder Newton became increasingly skeptical about the direction of the AAA, particularly the AAA's tendency to analyze rather than act on the problems facing black Americans.

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Bono
Paul David Hewson (born 10 May 1960), most commonly known by his stage name Bono (/ˈbɒnoʊ/ BON-oh), is an Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his future wife, Alison Stewart, and the future members of U2. Bono writes almost all U2 lyrics, often using political, social, and religious themes. During their early years, Bono's lyrics contributed to U2's rebellious and spiritual tone. As the band matured, his lyrics became inspired more by personal experiences shared with members of U2.
Outside the band, he has collaborated and recorded with numerous artists, is managing director and a managing partner of Elevation Partners, and has refurbished and owns The Clarence Hotel in Dublin with The Edge. Bono is also widely known for his activism concerning Africa, for which he co-founded DATA, EDUN, the ONE Campaign and Product Red. He has organised and played in several benefit concerts and has met with influential politicians. Bono has been praised and criticised for his activism and involvement with U2. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, and was named as a Person of the Year by Time, among other awards and nominations.

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Brian Epstein
Brian Samuel Epstein (

/ˈɛpstaɪn/; 19 September 1934 – 27 August 1967), was an English music entrepreneur; best known for being the manager of The Beatles, until his death. He also managed many other musical artists, such as Gerry & the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, Cilla Black, The Remo Four, and The Cyrkle. His management company was named NEMS Enterprises after his family's music stores, also called NEMS (North End Music Stores).
Epstein paid for The Beatles to record a demonstration tape in Decca's London studios, which resulted in Decca declining to sign the group to a contract. After approaching nearly all all the major recording companies and recording producers in London and being rejected, Epstein managed to secure an EMI recording contract under threat of withdrawing the sale of EMI's records at his NEMS music stores. NEMS was one of the biggest musical retail outlets in the North of England. Record producer George Martin offered a contract on behalf of EMI's small Parlophone label, only when informed of the economic threat to EMI by Epstein.

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Brian Jones
Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones (28 February 1942 – 3 July 1969), was an English musician and a founder member of the Rolling Stones.
Jones' main instruments were the guitar and the harmonica, but he played a wide variety of other musical instruments and was a talented multi-instrumentalist. His innovative use of traditional or folk instruments, such as the sitar and marimba, was integral to the changing sound of the band.
Originally the leader of the group, Jones' fellow bandmembers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards soon overshadowed him; especially after they became a successful songwriting team. He developed a serious drug abuse problem over the years and his role in the band steadily diminished. He was asked to leave the Rolling Stones in June 1969 and guitarist Mick Taylor took his place in the group. Jones died less than a month later by drowning in the swimming pool at his home on Cotchford Farm in East Sussex.
Original Stones bassist Bill Wyman stated about Jones: "...he formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs ... Very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it - highly intelligent - and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away."

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Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot (

/ˈbrɪdʒɨt bɑrˈdoʊ/; French: [bʁiʒit baʁdo]; born 28 September 1934) is a former French fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex symbols of the 1960s. Starting in 1969, Bardot's features became the official face of Marianne (who had previously been anonymous) to represent the liberty of France.
Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer in early life. She started her acting career in 1952 and, after appearing in 16 films, became world-famous due to her role in her then-husband Roger Vadim's controversial film And God Created Woman. She later starred in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 cult film Contempt. Bardot was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress for her role in Louis Malle's 1965 film Viva Maria!. Bardot caught the attention of French intellectuals. She was the subject of Simone de Beauvoir's 1959 essay, The Lolita Syndrome, which described Bardot as a "locomotive of women's history" and built upon existentialist themes to declare her the first and most liberated woman of post-war France.

wn.com/Brigitte_Bardot

Bruce Spizer
David "Bruce" Spizer (born July 2, 1955) is a tax attorney in New Orleans, Louisiana, who is also recognized as an expert on The Beatles. He has published eight books, and is frequently quoted as an authority on the history of the band and its recordings.
Spizer was born and raised in New Orleans. He attended Isidore Newman School and then received B.A., M.B.A., and J.D. degrees from Tulane University, where he was a member of honorary societies Phi Beta Kappa and the Order of the Coif. While pursuing his legal career, he also managed The Cold, a popular New Wave band in New Orleans.
In 1997, Spizer earned a large legal fee from the settlement of a class action lawsuit, and decided to use some of the money to replace his childhood collection of Beatles LPs (which had been damaged by cockroaches) with a new set of first edition albums. Drawn into the world of Beatles collectors, he ended up writing and self-publishing The Beatles Records on Vee-Jay, about the relationship between EMI, the Beatles' U.K. record label, and Vee-Jay Records, the U.S. label that released the band's first records in the U.S. As of 2011, Spizer has written and published eight books about The Beatles. A New York Times reviewer described his books as containing "a wealth of detail about the Beatles' American recordings and their first visit to the United States, touching on everything from contracts and lawsuits to promotional materials, all richly illustrated." A New York Daily News article called his The Beatles' Story on Capitol Records "a Beatle collector's fantasy by a fanatic Beatles collector and historian."

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Bruno Koschmider
Bruno Koschmider (born 1926, Danzig (Gdańsk) - died 2000, Hamburg, Germany) was a German entrepreneur in Hamburg, Germany best known for employing The Beatles in the early 1960s. He controlled various businesses, such as the Bambi Kino, which was a porn cinema, The Indra club and The Kaiserkeller.
Allan Williams booked The Beatles (in May 1960) into Koschmider's Indra club.
The Beatles first played at the Indra club - sleeping in small, dirty rooms in the Bambi Kino - and then moved (after the closure of the Indra) to the larger Kaiserkeller In October 1960, they left Koschmider's club and worked at the "Top Ten Club", which was run by Peter Eckhorn. When Paul McCartney and Pete Best went back to the Bambi Kino to get their belongings they found it in almost total darkness. As a snub to Koschmider, they found a condom, attached it to a nail on the concrete wall of their room, and set fire to it. There was no real damage, but Koschmider reported them for attempted arson. McCartney and Best spent three hours in a local jail and were deported, as was George Harrison, for working under the legal age limit.

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Chas Newby
Charles 'Chas' Newby (born 18 June 1941, in Blackpool, Lancashire, England), was temporarily the bassist for The Beatles in December 1960, following the departure of Stuart Sutcliffe. When The Beatles returned from Germany for the first time, they were short of a bass guitarist. Pete Best suggested Chas Newby. Chas had been with The Blackjacks (Pete Best's group), and was now attending university, but was on vacation and so agreed to play with The Beatles. He appeared with them for four engagements in December 1960 (December 17th, Casbah Club, Liverpool; December 24th, Grosvenor Ballroom, Liscard; December 27th, Litherland Town Hall; December 31st, Casbah Club). John Lennon asked him to go to Germany, for the Beatles' second trip, but he chose to return to university.
Chas later became a teacher of Mathematics at Droitwich Spa High School in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, England.

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Cynthia Lennon
Cynthia Lillian Lennon (née Powell, born 10 September 1939) is the former wife of musician John Lennon, and mother of Julian Lennon. She grew up in the middle-class section of Hoylake, on the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. At the age of twelve, she was accepted into the Junior Art School, and was later enrolled in the Liverpool College of Art. Lennon also attended the college; a meeting with Powell in a calligraphy class led to their relationship.
When Lennon was performing in Hamburg with The Beatles, she rented Lennon's bedroom from his aunt and legal guardian, Mimi Smith. After she became pregnant, the Lennons were married on 23 August 1962, at the Mount Pleasant Register office in Liverpool. Starting in 1964, the Lennon family lived at Kenwood in Weybridge, where she kept house and participated with her husband in a London-based social life. In 1968, Lennon left her for Yoko Ono; the couple's divorce was legally granted on 8 November 1968.
She married Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini in 1970, divorcing him in 1973. In 1976, she married John Twist, an engineer from Lancashire, but divorced him in 1983. After her divorce from Twist, she changed her name back to Lennon by deed poll and met Jim Christie, her partner for 17 years. She published a book of memoirs, A Twist of Lennon, in 1978, and later married Noel Charles, a night club owner, in 2002. In September 2005, she published a more intimate biography, John. Over the years she staged several auctions of memorabilia associated with her life with Lennon. In 2006, she and her son attended the Las Vegas premiere of the Cirque du Soleil production of Love, which was her first public appearance with Ono. She currently lives in Majorca, Spain.

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Cynthia Powell
Cynthia Lillian Lennon (née Powell, born 10 September 1939) is the former wife of musician John Lennon, and mother of Julian Lennon. She grew up in the middle-class section of Hoylake, on the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. At the age of twelve, she was accepted into the Junior Art School, and was later enrolled in the Liverpool College of Art. Lennon also attended the college; a meeting with Powell in a calligraphy class led to their relationship.
When Lennon was performing in Hamburg with The Beatles, she rented Lennon's bedroom from his aunt and legal guardian, Mimi Smith. After she became pregnant, the Lennons were married on 23 August 1962, at the Mount Pleasant Register office in Liverpool. Starting in 1964, the Lennon family lived at Kenwood in Weybridge, where she kept house and participated with her husband in a London-based social life. In 1968, Lennon left her for Yoko Ono; the couple's divorce was legally granted on 8 November 1968.
She married Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini in 1970, divorcing him in 1973. In 1976, she married John Twist, an engineer from Lancashire, but divorced him in 1983. After her divorce from Twist, she changed her name back to Lennon by deed poll and met Jim Christie, her partner for 17 years. She published a book of memoirs, A Twist of Lennon, in 1978, and later married Noel Charles, a night club owner, in 2002. In September 2005, she published a more intimate biography, John. Over the years she staged several auctions of memorabilia associated with her life with Lennon. In 2006, she and her son attended the Las Vegas premiere of the Cirque du Soleil production of Love, which was her first public appearance with Ono. She currently lives in Majorca, Spain.

wn.com/Cynthia_Powell

Daniel Lanois
Daniel Lanois (

/lænˈwɑː/ lan-WAH; born September 19, 1951 in Hull, Quebec) is a Canadian record producer, guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. He has released a number of albums of his own work and has produced albums for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Brandon Flowers and Ron Sexsmith. Lanois is best known for his work with Brian Eno, the pair collaborating on a number of projects together and producing several platinum albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree. Three albums produced or co-produced by Lanois have won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and four others received nominations.
Lanois started his production career when he was 17, working in his own studio with his brother Bob Lanois in the basement of their mother's Ancaster, Ontario home, recording local artists including Simply Saucer. Later Daniel started Grant Avenue Studios in an old house he purchased in Hamilton, Ontario. He worked with a number of local bands, including Martha and the Muffins (for whom his sister Jocelyne played bass), Ray Materick, as well as the Canadian children's singer Raffi.

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Dave Dexter, Jr.
Dave E. Dexter, Jr. (1915 – 1990) was an American music journalist, record company executive, and producer known primarily for his long association with Capitol Records. He worked with many important figures in jazz and traditional popular music, including Count Basie, Peggy Lee, Duke Ellington, and Frank Sinatra. He is also known for his role in packaging and sometimes altering the recordings of The Beatles for the American market.
Dexter was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His career in music began in journalism, as he wrote about music for the Kansas City Journal-Post and then for Down Beat magazine in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this time, he produced an album entitled Kansas City Jazz which documented his hometown's jazz scene, showcasing such talents as Count Basie, Lester Young, and Big Joe Turner.
In 1943, Dexter joined Capitol Records, established the previous year, initially writing press releases and doing other publicity work, but eventually rising to the position of A&R representative. Over the next three decades, he signed some of the biggest names in music to the label, including Frank Sinatra, Stan Kenton, Peggy Lee,Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman and Kay Starr. He produced the first Dixieland recordings to reach the music charts, and was responsible for the landmark 1944 collection The History of Jazz. He also compiled a series of world music albums, Capitol of the World, and served as editor of the company's own publication, Capitol News. His productions included the Duke Ellington classic "Satin Doll".

wn.com/Dave_Dexter,_Jr.

David Bowie
David Bowie (

/ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.
Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.

wn.com/David_Bowie

David Hungate
David Hungate (b. August 5, 1948) is a bass player noted as a member of Los Angeles pop-rock band Toto from 1977 to 1982. Along with most of his Toto bandmates, Hungate did sessions on a number of hit albums of the 1970s, including Boz Scaggs's Silk Degrees and Alice Cooper's From the Inside.
Hungate played on Toto's first four records, including multiple Grammy award-winning album, Toto IV. He left the band shortly after its release for a career as a session musician in Nashville. Hungate also plays guitar and has produced and recorded with several country artists such as Chet Atkins. Currently residing in Nashville, Hungate has collaborated with both former and current members of Toto for occasional recordings and gigs over the years. He was also a primary member of AOR supergroup Mecca fronted by Joe Vana and Fergie Frederiksen, the latter also of Toto fame. In 1990 he released a solo album entitled "Souvenir" (on CBS). Jeff Porcaro played drums on some of the tracks on the album.
Hungate attended North Texas State University College of Music, where he played bass in the One O'Clock Lab Band the year that it performed at the 1970 Montreaux Jazz Festival. He is the son of the late US Congressman (and later Federal District Judge) William L Hungate.

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David Paich
David Frank Paich (born June 25, 1954 in Los Angeles, California) is a multi-disciplined musical contributor. His contibutions include performing as a live and studio session musician, keyboard player, recording producer, arranger, vocalist and main composer of the Los Angeles-based rock/pop band Toto. With Toto, Paich has released 17 albums and sold over 30 million records. Additionally, Paich has contributed to a host of artists with his songwriting and arrangements including working with Boz Skaggs extensively in the 1970s and Michael Jackson in the 1980s.
He is the son of the late jazz composer, musician, and arranger Marty Paich, having adopted many of his father's skills for his contribution to music.
A prolific writer of chart-breakers, Paich wrote or co-wrote hits such as "Hold the Line", "Lowdown", "Lido Shuffle", "Georgy Porgy", "Rosanna", "Got To Be Real", and "Lady Love Me (One More Time)". He also performed lead vocals on the Toto hits "Africa", "Lovers in the Night", and "Stranger in Town".

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David Shayler
David Shayler (born 24 December 1965) is a British journalist and former MI5 (Security Service) officer. Shayler earned notoriety after being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for his passing secret documents to the Mail on Sunday in August 1997 that alleged that MI5 was paranoid about socialists, and that it had previously investigated Labour Party ministers Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw and Harriet Harman. David Shayler's website (davidshayler.com) is no longer being maintained by him.
Shayler was born in Middlesbrough. He attended John Hampden Grammar School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire whose head teacher once described him as "a born rebel who sails close to the wind ... and suffers neither fools nor their arguments gladly". He later attended the University of Dundee starting in 1984 where he was editor of the student newspaper Annasach and was responsible for publishing extracts of the book Spycatcher by another former MI5 officer Peter Wright (banned in England at the time).^{[citation needed]} He graduated with a 2:1 degree in English (2nd class honours upper division) in July 1989. After leaving university he worked as a journalist at the Sunday Times newspaper although his employment was terminated six months later.

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Derek Taylor
Derek Taylor (7 May 1932 – 8 September 1997) was an English journalist, writer and publicist, best known for his work as press officer for The Beatles. He had started his career as a local journalist in Liverpool working for the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, then becoming a North England-based writer for national British newspapers that included the News Chronicle, the Sunday Dispatch and the Sunday Express. He also served as a regular columnist and theatre critic for the Daily Express.
Taylor was a national journalist when he was assigned to write a review of a Beatles concert. He had been expected by his editors to write a piece critical of what at that time was considered by the national press as an inconsequential teen fad. However, he was enchanted by the group and instead sang their praises. Shortly afterwards, he was invited to meet The Beatles and soon became a trusted journalist in their circle.
As The Beatles gained national attention in Britain, Taylor's editors conceived of running a column ostensibly written by a Beatle to boost circulation, to be ghostwritten by Taylor. George Harrison was the Beatle eventually decided upon. Although Taylor was initially only given the right to approve or disapprove of the content, Harrison's dissection of the first draft turned the column into an ongoing collaboration between the two, with Harrison providing the stories and Taylor providing the polish.

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Dickie Valentine
Dickie Valentine (4 November 1929 – 6 May 1971) was an English pop singer in the 1950s. In addition to several other Top Ten hit singles, Valentine had two chart toppers on the UK Singles Chart with "Finger of Suspicion" (1954) and "Christmas Alphabet" (1955).
Valentine was born Richard Maxwell (his birth father was Dickie Maxwell) in Marylebone, London. He was known as Richard Bryce, as his mother later married Bryce, and gave her young son that surname.
His first acting job was at age three, when he appeared in the Jack Hulbert/Cicely Courtneidge film Jack's the Boy.
He first trained as a singer during his work as a child actor, and during that time developed a flexible vocal style and skills as an impersonator of famous singers. He was overheard singing by actor-singer Bill O'Connor while working as a call boy at Her Majesty's Theatre, and encouraged him to take lessons. Since he could not afford them, O'Connor paid for them.
He sang in clubs and learned stagecraft to help gain confidence and experience. While he was in his late teens, he was singing at the Panama Club one night when music publisher Sid Green saw him and brought him to the attention of Ted Heath.

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Domenico Modugno
Domenico Modugno (9 January 1928 – 6 August 1994) was an Italian singer, songwriter, actor, and later in life, a member of the Italian Parliament. He is known for his 1958 international hit song "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)". He is considered the first Italian cantautore.
Modugno was born in Polignano a Mare, province of Bari (Puglia).
From a young age he wanted to become an actor and in 1951, after his military service, he enrolled in an acting school. While still studying he had a role in a cinematographic version of Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo as well as some other films.
In 1935 his father moved to San Pietro Vernotico, in the Province of Brindisi (where his parents are buried). Here Domenico attended primary school and learned San Piertro Vernotico's dialect, which belongs to the linguistic area of Lecce's dialect, which is similar to Sicilian. He attended secondary school in Lecce.
In 1957 his song "Lazzarella," sung by Aurelio Fierro, came second in the Festival della Canzone Napoletana, bringing him his first taste of popularity.

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Donovan
Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch, 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist. Initially labelled as an imitator of Bob Dylan, Donovan quickly developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music (notably calypso). He has variously lived in Scotland, London, California and Ireland, and currently lives with his family in County Cork in Ireland.
Emerging from the British folk scene, Donovan shot to fame in the United Kingdom in early 1965 with a series of live performances on the pop TV series, Ready Steady Go!. Initially signing with the British label Pye Records in 1965, he recorded a handful of singles and two albums in the folk music vein, but after signing a new contract with the US label Epic Records his popularity rapidly spread to the US and other countries. After extricating himself from his original management contract, he began a long and successful collaboration with Mickie Most, one of the leading British independent record producers of the era, scoring a string of hits in the UK, the US, Australia and other countries. His successful records in the 1960s included the UK hits "Catch the Wind" and "Colours" in 1965, while "Sunshine Superman" topped the US Billboard Hot 100 chart the following year, and reached #2 in Britain. Donovan was the first artist to be signed to CBS/Epic Records by then-new Administrative Vice President Clive Davis, who later became head of the CBS Record empire.

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Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.

wn.com/Elton_John

Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King".
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family at the age of 13. He began his career there in 1954, working with Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, who wanted to bring the sound of African American music to a wider audience. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was the most important popularizer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage the singer for over two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", released in January 1956, was a number one hit. He became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll with a series of network television appearances and chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs, many from African American sources, and his uninhibited performance style made him enormously popular—and controversial. In November 1956, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender.

wn.com/Elvis_Presley

Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, (born 30 March 1945) is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and influential guitarists of all time. Clapton ranked second in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and fourth in Gibson's Top 50 Guitarists of All Time.
In the mid 1960s, Clapton departed from the Yardbirds to play blues with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. In his one-year stay with Mayall, Clapton gained the nickname "Slowhand". Immediately after leaving Mayall, Clapton formed Cream, a power trio with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce in which Clapton played sustained blues improvisations and "arty, blues-based psychedelic pop." For most of the 1970s, Clapton's output bore the influence of the mellow style of J.J. Cale and the reggae of Bob Marley. His version of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" helped reggae reach a mass market. Two of his most popular recordings were "Layla", recorded by Derek and the Dominos, another band he formed and Robert Johnson's "Crossroads", recorded by Cream. A recipient of seventeen Grammy Awards, in 2004 Clapton was awarded a CBE for services to music. In 1998, Clapton, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance abusers.

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Fats Domino
Antoine Dominique "Fats" Domino Jr. (born February 26, 1928) is an American R&B and rock and roll pianist and singer-songwriter. He was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Domino was French Creole and Creole was his first language. Domino was delivered at home by his midwife grandmother who was born into enslavement in 1857. Like most families in the Lower Ninth Ward, Domino's family were new arrivals from the sugar and cotton plantations. His father was a well known violinist, and Domino was inspired to play himself. He eventually learned from his Uncle, jazz guitarist Harrison Verrett. Fats released five Gold (million selling) records before 1955. Domino also had 35 Top 40 American Hits and has a music style based on traditional R&B ensembles or Bass, Piano, Electric Guitar, Drums, and Saxophone.
Domino first attracted national attention with "The Fat Man" in 1949 on Imperial Records. This song is an early rock and roll record, featuring a rolling piano and Domino doing "wah-wah" vocalizing over a strong back beat. "The Fat Man" sold one million copies by 1953. Fats Domino released a series of hit songs with producer and co-writer Dave Bartholomew, saxophonists Herbert Hardesty and Alvin "Red" Tyler and drummer Earl Palmer. Other notable and long-standing musicians in Domino's band were saxophonists Reggie Houston, Lee Allen, and Fred Kemp, Domino's trusted bandleader. Domino finally crossed into the pop mainstream with "Ain't That A Shame" (1955), which hit the Top Ten, though Pat Boone characteristically hit #1 with a milder cover of the song that received wider radio airplay in a racially-segregated era. Domino eventually had 37 Top 40 singles.

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Fifth Beatle
The Fifth Beatle is an informal title that various commentators in the press and entertainment industry have applied to persons who were at one point a member of The Beatles, or who had a strong association with the "Fab Four" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) during the group's existence. The "Fifth Beatle" claims started appearing in the press immediately upon the band's sensational rise to global fame in 1963–1964 as the most famous quartet in pop culture.
At The Beatles' 1988 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, George Harrison at one point stated that there were only two "fifth Beatles": Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall (referring to the Beatles' public relations manager and road manager-turned-business-executive, respectively). In a 1997 BBC interview, Paul McCartney stated: "If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was [Beatles' manager] Brian Epstein."
The term is not used to indicate the chronology of band members joining the group. Pete Best joined Lennon, McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe and Harrison on the eve of their Hamburg sojourn, the five using the monikers, "The Silver Beetles" and "The Silver Beatles" (they would experiment with "The Beat Brothers" and ultimately "The Beatles" while in Hamburg with Best).

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Francie Schwartz
Francie Schwartz, born 1944, is an American scriptwriter and the former girlfriend, during the late 1960s, of Paul McCartney, who referred to her as "Franny". At the time, McCartney was engaged to the actress Jane Asher who broke off the engagement when she found them in bed together, although Schwartz claims otherwise. One of the fans who used to hang around McCartney's Cavendish Avenue house says that "...Paul brought this American girl home...[and a little while later]...another car turned into Cavendish Avenue – it was Jane. She'd come back...earlier than she was supposed to. Jane went into the house. A bit later on she came storming out again and drove away." Later on, Jane's mother arrived to retrieve Jane's things.
In 1968, intrigued by the Beatles' formation of the Apple Corps which she had read about in the American magazine "Rolling Stone", at the age of 23 she went to London to see if one of her scripts was of interest to what she regarded as the "non-establishment". She met the Beatles at a critical point in their development – when they were making the "White Album".

wn.com/Francie_Schwartz

Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra,

/sɨˈnɑːtrə/, (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and film actor.
Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the "bobby soxers", he released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra in 1946. His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1953 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity.
He signed with Capitol Records in 1953 and released several critically lauded albums (such as In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice 'n' Easy). Sinatra left Capitol to found his own record label, Reprise Records in 1961 (finding success with albums such as Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, Sinatra at the Sands and Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim), toured internationally, was a founding member of the Rat Pack and fraternized with celebrities and statesmen, including John F. Kennedy. Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, recorded the retrospective September of My Years, starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, and scored hits with "Strangers in the Night" and "My Way".

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Geoff Emerick
Geoffrey Emerick (born 1946 in London) is an English recording studio audio engineer, who is best known for his work with The Beatles' albums Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Abbey Road. He is widely regarded as one of the best engineers in all of recording history.
Emerick first started working as an assistant engineer at EMI at the age of 15. To familiarize with his work, he was placed under the supervision of another assistant engineer, Richard Langham. On his second day of work at EMI, Richard Langham was assigned to be the assistant engineer of Norman Smith who will be doing the first recording session of the Beatles in the evening. As a new recruit, Emerick was not entitled to get over-time pay, but was lucky enough to witness the first-ever EMI recording session by the finalised line-up of The Beatles in 1962, during which the group recorded for the first time with new drummer Ringo Starr on what would eventually become their first hit single "Love Me Do". As assistant engineer, Emerick worked on numerous early recordings by the Beatles, and also helped record other artists for the label, including Judy Garland. He assisted at the EMI artist test of The Hollies.

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George Dunning
George Garnett Dunning (November 17, 1920 – February 15, 1979) was a Canadian film maker and animator. He is best known for animating and directing the 1968 Beatles' film Yellow Submarine.
He was born in Toronto and studied in Canada at the Ontario College of Art, and soon found freelance work as an illustrator. Dunning joined the NFB of Canada in 1943, where he worked with Norman McLaren and contributed to several episodes of the Chants populaires series. From 1944 to 1947 Dunning created many original short films and developed his skills animating articulated, painted, metal cut-outs.
In 1948, he spent a year working for UNESCO in Paris under the mentorship of Czech-born animator Berthold Bartosch. Then in 1949, he and fellow NFB grad Jim McKay created one of Toronto’s first animation studios, Graphic Associates, where he produced commercials and gave Michael Snow his first job in film. In 1956 he moved to England to manage UPA’s new London office. After the office went under, he hired many of the UPA staff to work for him and his newly established production company, TVC. By 1961, TVC was producing about one hundred commercials a year. During this time Dunning also managed to make many personal short films noted for their surrealistic atmosphere and Kafkaesque themes.

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George Formby, Jr.
George Formby, OBE (26 May 1904 – 6 March 1961), born George Hoy Booth, was a British comedy actor, singer-songwriter, and comedian. He sang light, comical songs, accompanying himself on the banjo ukulele or banjolele. He was a major star of stage and screen in the 1930s and 1940s.
Formby was born at 3 Westminster Street, Wigan, Lancashire, as George Hoy Booth. The eldest of seven surviving children, Formby was born blind because of an obstructive caul. His sight was restored during a violent coughing fit or sneeze when he was a few months old.His father James Booth used the stage name George Formby, adopted from the town of Formby, Lancashire. He was one of the great music hall comedians of his day, fully the equal of his son's later success. His father, not wishing him to watch his performances, moved the family to Atherton Road in Hindley. It was from there that the younger Formby was apprenticed as a jockey when he was seven. He rode his first professional race at 10, when he weighed under 4 stone (56 lb; 25 kg).

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George Harrison
George Harrison,MBE (25 February 1943 – 29 November 2001) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian culture and mysticism, and introduced it to the other Beatles, as well as their Western audience. Following the band's break-up he was a successful solo artist, and later a founding member of the Traveling Wilburys. Harrison was also a session musician and a film and record producer. He is listed at number 11 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
Although most of The Beatles' songs were written by Lennon and McCartney, Beatle albums generally included one or two of Harrison's own songs, from With The Beatles onwards. His later compositions with The Beatles include "Here Comes the Sun", "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". By the time of the band's break-up, Harrison had accumulated a backlog of material, which he then released as the triple album All Things Must Pass in 1970, from which two hit singles originated: a double A-side single, "My Sweet Lord" backed with "Isn't It a Pity", and "What Is Life". In addition to his solo work, Harrison co-wrote two hits for former Beatle Ringo Starr, as well as songs for the Traveling Wilburys—the supergroup he formed in 1988 with Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison.

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George Martin
Sir George Henry Martin CBE (born 3 January 1926) is an English record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, audio engineer and musician. He is sometimes referred to as "the Fifth Beatle"—a title that he has described as "nonsense"—in reference to his extensive involvement on each of The Beatles' original albums. He is considered one of the greatest record producers of all time, with 30 number one hit singles in the UK and 23 number one hits in the USA.
Influenced by a range of musical styles, encompassing Cole Porter and Johnny Dankworth, he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1947 to 1950, studying piano and oboe. Following his graduation, he worked for the BBC's classical music department, then joined EMI in 1950. Martin produced comedy and novelty records in the early 1950s, working with the likes of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.
In a career spanning over six decades, Martin has worked in music, film, television and live performance. He has also held a number of senior executive roles at media companies and contributes to a wide range of charitable causes, including his work for the Prince's Trust and the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

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George Michael
George Michael (born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (Greek: Γεώργιος Κυριάκος Παναγιώτου); 25 June 1963) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer. Michael rose to fame in the 1980s when he formed the pop duo Wham! with his school friend, Andrew Ridgeley. His first solo single, "Careless Whisper", was released when he was still in the duo and sold about six million copies worldwide.
As one of the world's best-selling music artists, Michael has sold more than 100 million records worldwide as of 2010. His 1987 debut solo album, Faith, has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and made several records and achievements in the United States. Michael has garnered seven number one singles in the UK and eight number one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked Michael the 40th most successful artist on the Billboard Hot 100 Top All-Time Artists list.
Michael has won numerous music awards throughout his 30-year career, including three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male twice, four MTV Video Music Awards, four Ivor Novello Awards, three American Music Awards, and two Grammy Awards from eight nominations.

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George Toogood Smith
George Toogood Smith (1903 – 5 June 1955) was the maternal uncle, through marriage, of John Lennon. Smith operated his family's two dairy farms and a retail outlet with his brother, Frank Smith, in the village of Woolton, Liverpool. The farms had been in the Smith family for four generations, but after the start of World War II, they were taken over by the British Government for war work.
Smith started courting Mimi Stanley in the spring of 1932, but was thwarted by her indifference and her father's interference. After delivering milk to the hospital where she worked he gave her an ultimatum that she must marry him, "or nothing at all!" On 15 September 1939, she finally married him. They bought a semi-detached house called Mendips, named after the range of hills, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Liverpool.
Lennon lived with Smith and his wife for the majority of his childhood, and Smith taught the young Lennon to read, read him nursery rhymes at night, and later taught Lennon how to solve crossword puzzles. He also taught him to draw and paint and bought him his first mouth organ. Smith collapsed and died on a Sunday at his home of a liver haemorrhage, aged 52, and was buried in St Peter’s Church graveyard, Woolton.

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Gerald Ford
Gerald Rudolph "Jerry" Ford, Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr.; July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974. As the first person appointed to the vice-presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment (after Spiro Agnew had resigned), when he became President upon Richard Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, he became the only President of the United States who was never elected President nor Vice-President by the Electoral College. Before ascending to the vice-presidency, Ford served nearly 25 years as the Representative from Michigan's 5th congressional district, eight of them as the Republican Minority Leader.
As President, Ford signed the Helsinki Accords, marking a move toward détente in the Cold War. With the conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam nine months into his presidency, U.S. involvement in Vietnam essentially ended. Domestically, Ford presided over arguably the weakest economy since the Great Depression, with growing inflation and a recession during his tenure. One of his more controversial acts was to grant a presidential pardon to President Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. During Ford's incumbency, foreign policy was characterized in procedural terms by the increased role Congress began to play, and by the corresponding curb on the powers of the President. In 1976, Ford narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, but lost the presidential election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

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Giles Martin
Giles Martin (born 9 October 1969) is an English record producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He is the son of Sir George Martin, famed producer of almost all of The Beatles' records.
Giles Martin grew up without much awareness of The Beatles, and was discouraged by his father from pursuing a career in music lest the inevitable comparisons should be made. Giles ignored the advice, first playing in the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful band Velvet Jones, then writing jingles in college, then working in various musical capacities in the UK. In 1995, he was appointed co-music director for the television and radio music countdown show, The Great Music Experience. He worked on the Party at the Palace concert to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee, for which he also produced the subsequent album and DVD.
Martin's first notable producer role came with the high-selling UK band Kula Shaker. After that, his production and mixing credits came to include Jeff Beck, Elvis Costello, INXS, and Kate Bush. In 2004 Martin produced Hayley Westenra's multi-platinum album Pure, the UK’s fastest-selling classical album of all time.

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Glyn Johns
Glyn Johns (born 15 February 1942, Epsom, Surrey, England) is a British musician, recording engineer and record producer.
He has worked with such artists as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Easybeats, The Band, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Clash, The Steve Miller Band, Small Faces, Spooky Tooth, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Blue Öyster Cult, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Midnight Oil, New Model Army, Belly, Joe Satriani, Ronnie Lane, Rod Stewart with Faces, Joan Armatrading, Buckacre, Gallagher and Lyle, Georgie Fame, Family, Helen Watson, Fairport Convention, Humble Pie and many others.
In the 1960s, while associated with the rock band The Presidents, Johns began working as a recording studio engineer at IBC Studios, Portland Place, London and was able to take the band in during weekends and try his skills at production and recording. The Presidents was his first true production work and some of the original tracks are available to hear and record at the Sound Bite Page on The President's web site www.the-presidents.org.uk. In 1969, Johns was called upon to rescue the troublesome Get Back sessions for The Beatles. Johns compiled several versions of the album, which were all rejected by the band, before the project was eventually turned over to producer Phil Spector. Spector's version became the released album, which was retitled Let It Be.

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Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus (born June 19, 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.
Marcus was born in San Francisco and earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone (where he was the first reviews editor, at $30 a week) and other publications, including Creem, The Village Voice, and Artforum. From 1983 to 1989, Marcus was on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle.
His 1975 book, Mystery Train, was notable for placing rock and roll within the context of American cultural archetypes, from Moby-Dick to The Great Gatsby to Stagger Lee. Marcus's "recognition of the unities in the American imagination that already exist" inspired countless rock scribes. On 30 August 2011, TIME magazine published a list of what they consider the 100 best non-fiction books since 1923, when the magazine was first published and included "Mystery Train" on the list, one of only five dealing with culture, and the only one dealing on the subject of American music.

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Harry Nilsson
Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994) was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. On all but his earliest recordings he is credited as Nilsson. He is known for the hit singles "Everybody's Talkin'" (1969), "Without You" (1971), and "Coconut" (1972). Nilsson's career is also notable for the fact that he was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists of his era to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours.
He was awarded Grammys for two of his recordings; best male contemporary vocal in 1969 for "Everybody's Talkin'", the theme song to the Academy Award-winning movie Midnight Cowboy, and best male pop vocal in 1972 for "Without You."
Nilsson was born in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. His paternal grandparents were Swedish circus performers and dancers, especially known for their "aerial ballet" (which is the title of one of Nilsson's albums). His father, Harry Edward Nilsson, Jr., abandoned the family when young Harry was three. An autobiographical reference to this is found in the opening to Nilsson's song "1941":

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Henry Mancini
Enrico Nicola "Henry" Mancini (April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor and arranger, best remembered for his film and television scores. He won a record number of Grammy Awards (20), plus a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in 1995. His best-known works include the jazz-idiom theme to The Pink Panther film series ("The Pink Panther Theme"), the Peter Gunn Theme from the television series, and back-to-back Academy Awards for the songs "Moon River" from the Blake Edwards film Breakfast at Tiffany's and "Days of Wine and Roses" from Edwards' film Days of Wine and Roses. He also composed the score of famous films such as Charade, The Great Race, Wait Until Dark or Silver Streak.
Mancini was born in the Little Italy neighborhood of Cleveland, and grew up near Pittsburgh, in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His parents emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Mancini's father, Quinto, (born March 13, 1893, Scanno, Italy) was a steelworker, who made his only child begin piccolo lessons at the age of eight. When Mancini was 12 years old, he began piano lessons. Quinto and Henry played flute together in the Aliquippa Italian immigrant band, "Sons of Italy". After graduating from Aliquippa High School in 1942, Mancini attended the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1943, after roughly one year at Juilliard, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the United States Army. In 1945, he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp in southern Germany.

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Horst Fascher
Horst Fascher (born 5 February 1936, Hamburg) is a previous German nightclub bouncer, and a friend of The Beatles during their days playing in Hamburg, Germany.
A onetime professional boxer whose career was cut short (he had unintentionally killed a sailor in a street fight), Fascher found work in clubs along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. When the Beatles (including original drummer Pete Best and bassist Stuart Sutcliffe) made their first trip to Germany in August 1960, Fascher befriended the young group, who played at the Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller.
As they rose through the ranks of bands playing the Reeperbahn (making five trips in all over the next two-and-a-half years), Fascher usually managed to be working at the same clubs, and for the same boss, as the Beatles. They visited him at home, and he in turn kept troublemakers away from the band. The only favour Fascher asked was to be able to sing with them occasionally onstage, which was granted; Eddie Cochran's music was a common choice.

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Hugh Padgham
Hugh Padgham is a British record producer. He has won many awards, including four Grammys, with Producer of the Year (1985) and Engineer of the Year. A 1992 poll in Mix magazine voted him one of the world's Top Ten Most Influential Producers.
Padgham started out as a tape operator at Advision Studios, working in recording sessions for Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. From there he went to Lansdowne Studios and moved from tape-operator/assistant engineer to head engineer. In 1978, Padgham got a job at The Townhouse, where he engineered and/or produced acts including XTC, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins.
Padgham's previous work with Gabriel and Collins led to a long and enormously successful collaboration with Genesis in the 1980s, which produced a string of hit albums and singles including Genesis and Invisible Touch. In addition to his work with Genesis and XTC, Padgham co-produced two albums with The Police: Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity, as well as Paul McCartney's Press to Play and The Human League's Hysteria.

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Hunter Davies
This article is about the Scottish writer. For the American writer see Hunter S. Thompson
Edward Hunter Davies (born 7 January 1936) is a prolific British author, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of many books, including the only authorised biography of The Beatles.
Davies was born in Johnstone to Scottish parents. For 4 years his family lived in Dumfries until Davies was aged 11. Davies has frequently quoted his boyhood hero as being football centre-forward, Billy Houliston, of Davies' then local team, Queen of the South.
His family moved to Carlisle when Davies was 11 and he attended the Creighton School in the city. Davies lived in Carlisle until he moved to study at university. During this time his father, who was a former RAF pay clerk, developed multiple sclerosis and had to retire on medical grounds from a civil service career. Davies joined the sixth form at Carlisle Grammar School and was awarded a place at University College, Durham to read for an Honours Degree in History, but after his first year he switched to a general arts course. He gained his first writing experience as a student, contributing to the university newspaper, Palatinate. However after completing his degree course he stayed on at Durham for another year to gain a teaching diploma.

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Ian MacDonald
Ian MacCormick (pseudonym Ian MacDonald; 3 October 1948 – 20 August 2003) was a British music critic and author, best known for both Revolution in the Head, his forensic history of The Beatles which borrowed techniques from art historians, and The New Shostakovich, a study of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. MacDonald was instrumental in popularising Nick Drake during the late 1970s and early 1980, a period during which Drake was largely forgotten.
MacDonald briefly attended King's College, Cambridge, at first to study English, but he later transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology. He dropped out after a year. While at Cambridge, he was distantly acquainted with the singer/songwriter Nick Drake. From 1972 to 1975 he served as assistant editor at the NME. McDonald began a songwriting collaboration as lyricist with Quiet Sun, which included his brother Bill MacCormick and future Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. The collaboration resumed in the late 1970s, with MacDonald providing lyrics for the album Listen Now. Later, Brian Eno assisted MacDonald in producing Sub Rosa, an album of his songs released on Manzanera's label.

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Ivan Vaughan
Ivan Vaughan (18 June 1942 - 16 August 1993) was a boyhood friend of John Lennon, and later schoolmate of Paul McCartney at the Liverpool Institute, both commencing school there in Sept. 1953. He was born on the same day as Paul McCartney in Liverpool. He played bass part-time in Lennon's first band, The Quarrymen, and was responsible for introducing Lennon to Paul McCartney at a community event (the Woolton village fête) on July 6, 1957, where The Quarrymen were performing. McCartney impressed Lennon, who invited McCartney to join the band, which he did a day later. This led to the formation of Lennon and McCartney's songwriting partnership, and later of The Beatles.
Vaughan studied classics at University College, London, married in 1966 and settled down to family life with a son and daughter, and became a teacher.
Lennon and McCartney never forgot the friend who brought them together. For a time they put Vaughan on the payroll of their Apple company, in charge of a plan that never took off to set up a school with a Sixties, hippie-style education ethos. Vaughan's wife Jan, a languages teacher, was hired to sit down with Lennon and McCartney and help with the French lyrics to the 1965 song "Michelle".

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J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972 aged 77. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.
Late in life and after his death Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive actions became public. His critics have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI. He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. FBI directors are now limited to one 10-year term, subject to extension by the United States Senate, because of his long and controversial tenure.

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Jackson Browne
Clyde Jackson Browne (born October 9, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and musician who has sold over 17 million albums in the United States alone.
Coming to prominence in the 1970s, Browne has written and recorded several notable songs throughout his career including "These Days", "The Pretender", "Running On Empty", "Lawyers in Love", "Doctor My Eyes", "Take It Easy", "For a Rocker", and "Somebody's Baby". In 2004, he was both inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Music by Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
Browne was born in Heidelberg, Germany, where his father, an American serviceman, was stationed. Browne's mother, Beatrice Amanda (née Dahl), was a Minnesota native of Norwegian ancestry. Browne has three siblings: Roberta "Berbie" Browne who was born in 1946 in Nuernberg, Germany (Nuremberg) and Edward Severin Browne who was born in 1949 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His younger sister, Gracie Browne, was born a number of years later. Browne moved to the Highland Park district of Los Angeles, California, at the age of 3 and in his teens began singing folk music in local venues like the Ash Grove and The Troubador Club. He attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California, graduating in 1966.

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James Hanratty
James Hanratty (4 October 1936, Bromley, Kent – 4 April 1962, Bedford Prison, Bedford), a petty criminal with no prior history of violence, was hanged for the murder of Michael Gregsten. Gregsten was shot dead in his car in a lay-by on the A6 at Deadman's Hill near the village of Clophill, Bedfordshire, on 23 August 1961; his mistress, Valerie Storie, was raped and shot in the same incident, leaving her paralysed. Charges on these additional crimes were kept in reserve. Hanratty's guilt was disputed until 2002, when DNA evidence settled the question of his involvement. The incident was to become known in the media as the 'A6 murder'.

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Jane Asher
Jane Asher (born 5 April 1946) is an English actress, author and entrepreneur.
Asher was the middle of three children born to Richard Alan John and Margaret Asher, née Eliot, in Willesden, North West London. Her father was a broadcaster and a consultant at the Central Middlesex Hospital and the author of notable medical articles. Asher's mother was a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.^{[citation needed]} Asher attended Queen's College in Harley Street, London and is the elder sister of Clare Asher, a radio actress and school inspector. Asher's elder brother is record producer Peter Asher,
, who was "Peter" of Peter and Gordon.
Asher was a child actress and appeared in the 1952 film Mandy and the 1955 science fiction film The Quatermass Xperiment. She also had a title role in a version of Alice in Wonderland (1958) and Through the Looking-Glass for Argo Records. In 1961 she co-starred in The Greengage Summer which was released in the United States as Loss of Innocence. She also appeared in the 1962 film and Disney TV programme, The Prince and the Pauper. British TV appearances included three episodes (1956–1958) of the British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood and as a panelist on the BBC's Juke Box Jury.

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Jann Wenner
Jann Simon Wenner (born January 7, 1946) is the co-founder and publisher of the music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone, as well as the owner of Men's Journal and Us Weekly magazines.
Wenner was born in New York City and grew up in a secular Jewish family.^{[citation needed]} His parents divorced in 1958, and he and his sisters, Kate and Merlyn, were sent to boarding schools to live. He graduated from high school at Chadwick School in 1963 and went on to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Before dropping out of Berkeley in 1966, Wenner was active in the Free Speech Movement and produced the column "Something's Happening" in the student-run newspaper, The Daily Californian. With the help of his mentor, San Francisco Chronicle jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, Wenner landed a job at Ramparts, a high-circulation muckraker, where Gleason was a contributing editor and Wenner worked on the magazine's spinoff newspaper.
In 1967, Wenner and Gleason founded Rolling Stone in San Francisco. To get the magazine off the ground, Wenner borrowed $7,500 from family members and from the family of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim. In the summer following the start of the magazine, Wenner and Schindelheim were married in a small Jewish ceremony.

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Jeff Lynne
Jeffrey "Jeff" Lynne (born 30 December 1947) is an English songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer who gained fame as the leader and sole constant member of Electric Light Orchestra. He was later a co-founder and member of The Traveling Wilburys together with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. Lynne has produced recordings for artists such as The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Roy Orbison, Dave Edmunds, Del Shannon and Tom Petty. He has co-written songs with Petty and also with George Harrison, whose 1987 album Cloud Nine was co-produced by Lynne and Harrison. Among the many compositions to his credit are such well-known hits as "Livin' Thing", "Evil Woman", "Turn to Stone", "Do Ya", "Xanadu", "Strange Magic", "Sweet Talkin' Woman", "Telephone Line", "Shine a Little Love", "Mr. Blue Sky", "Hold On Tight", "All Over the World", and "Don't Bring Me Down".
In 2008, The Washington Times named Lynne the fourth greatest record producer in music history.

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Jeff Porcaro
Jeffrey Thomas "Jeff" Porcaro (April 1, 1954 – August 5, 1992) was an American session drummer and a founding member of the Grammy Award winning band Toto. Porcaro was one of the most recorded drummers in history, working on hundreds of albums and thousands of sessions. While already an established studio player in the 1970s, he shot to prominence in the US as the drummer on the Steely Dan album Katy Lied. Allmusic has characterized him as "arguably the most highly regarded studio drummer in rock from the mid-'70s to the early '90s", further stating that "It is no exaggeration to say that the sound of mainstream pop/rock drumming in the 1980s was, to a large extent, the sound of Jeff Porcaro."
Porcaro was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the eldest son of Los Angeles session percussionist Joe Porcaro. His brothers Steve and Mike are both still active session musicians. Porcaro was raised in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles and attended Ulysses S. Grant High School.
On October 22, 1983, Porcaro married Susan Norris, a Los Angeles television newscaster. They had three sons, Christopher Joseph (born July 3, 1984), Miles Edwin Crawford (born June 12, 1986), and Nico Hendrix (born December 26, 1991).

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Jerry Herman
Jerry Herman (born July 10, 1931) is an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway musical theater. He composed the scores for the hit Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He has been nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles. In 2009, Herman received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He is a recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors.

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Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin (July 14, 1938 – November 28, 1994) was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.
Rubin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a bread delivery man and union representative, and grew up in the then-upscale Avondale neighborhood^{[citation needed]}.
Rubin's parents died within 10 months of each other, leaving Rubin the only person to take care of his younger brother, Gil, who was 13 at the time. Jerry wanted to teach Gil about the world and decided to take him to India. When relatives threatened to fight to obtain custody of Gil, Jerry decided to take his brother to Tel Aviv instead. There Rubin studied sociology while his brother, who had learned Hebrew, decided to stay in Israel and moved to a kibbutz. Before returning to social and political activism, Rubin made a visit to Cuba despite the law forbidding Americans to travel there^{[citation needed]}.
Rubin attended Cincinnati's Walnut Hills High School, co-editing the school newspaper, The Chatterbox and graduating in 1956. While in high school Rubin began to write for The Cincinnati Post, compiling sports scores from high school games. He later went on to graduate from the University of Cincinnati, receiving a degree in sociology. Rubin attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 but dropped out to focus on social activism^{[citation needed]}.

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Jimmie Nicol
James George "Jimmie"/"Jimmy" Nicol (born 3 August 1939, 93 Silverthorne Road, Battersea, London), is a British drummer, best known for temporarily replacing Ringo Starr in The Beatles for a series of concerts during the height of Beatlemania in 1964, elevating him from relative obscurity to worldwide fame and then back again in the space of a fortnight. Nicol had hoped that his association with The Beatles would greatly boost his career, but instead found that the spotlight moved away from him once Starr returned to the group. His subsequent lack of commercial success led him into bankruptcy in 1965. After then working with a number of different bands, which included a successful phase with The Spotnicks, he left the music business in 1967 to pursue a variety of entrepreneurial ventures. Later in his life he became a recluse preferring not to discuss his connection to The Beatles and refusing to seek financial gain from it. He has a son, Howard, who is a BAFTA award-winning sound engineer.

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Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States (1977–1981) and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office. Before he became President, Carter served as a U.S. Naval officer, was a peanut farmer, served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one as Governor of Georgia (1971–1975).
During Carter's term as President, two new cabinet-level departments were created: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), and returned the Panama Canal Zone to Panama. Throughout his career, Carter strongly emphasized human rights. He took office during a period of international stagflation, which persisted throughout his term. The end of his presidential tenure was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (at the end of 1979), 1980 Summer Olympics boycott by the United States of the Moscow Olympics and the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

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Jimmy Driftwood
James Corbitt Morris (June 20, 1907–July 12, 1998), known professionally as Jimmy Driftwood or Jimmie Driftwood, was a prolific American folk music songwriter and musician, most famous for his songs "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Tennessee Stud". Driftwood wrote more than 6,000 folk songs, of which more than 300 were recorded by various musicians.
Driftwood was born in Timbo, Arkansas on June 20, 1907. His father was folk singer Neil Morris. Driftwood learned to play guitar at a young age on his grandfather's homemade instrument. Driftwood used that unique guitar throughout his career and noted that its neck was made from a fence rail, its sides from an old ox yoke, and the head and bottom from the headboard of his grandmother's bed. This homemade instrument produced a pleasant distinctive resonant sound. Driftwood attended John Brown College in northwest Arkansas and later received a degree in education from Arkansas State Teacher's College. He started writing songs during his teaching career to teach his students history in an entertaining manner.

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Jimmy Webb
Jimmy Webb (born August 15, 1946) is an American songwriter, composer, and singer. He wrote numerous platinum-selling classics, including "Up, Up and Away", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", "The Worst That Could Happen", "All I Know", and "MacArthur Park". His songs have been performed by many popular contemporary singers, including Glen Campbell, The 5th Dimension, Thelma Houston, The Supremes, Richard Harris, Johnny Maestro, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Isaac Hayes, Art Garfunkel, Amy Grant, America, Linda Ronstadt, R.E.M., Michael Feinstein, Donna Summer and Carly Simon. According to BMI, his song "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" was the third most performed song in the fifty years between 1940 to 1990. Webb is the only artist ever to have received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration.
Jimmy Layne Webb was born August 15, 1946 in Elk City, Oklahoma. His father, Robert Lee Webb, was a Baptist minister and former member of the United States Marine Corps who presided over rural churches in southwestern Oklahoma and west Texas. With his mother's encouragement, Webb learned piano and organ, and by the age of 12 was playing in the choir of his father's churches, accompanied by his father on guitar and his mother on accordion. Webb grew up in a conservative religious home where his father restricted radio listening to country music and white gospel music.

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Joe Loss
Joshua Alexander "Joe" Loss LVO OBE (22 June 1909 – 6 June 1990) was a British musician popular during the British dance band era, and was founder of the Joe Loss Orchestra.
Loss was born in Spitalfields, London, the youngest of four children. His parents, Israel and Ada Loss, were Russian Jews and first cousins. His father was a cabinet-maker who had an office furnishing business. Loss was educated at Jews' Free School, Trinity College of Music and the London College of Music. He started violin lessons at the age of seven and later played violin at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool and also with Oscar Rabin. Loss started band leading in the early 1930s, working at the Astoria Ballroom and soon breaking into variety at the Kit-Cat Club. In 1934 he topped the bill at the Holborn Empire but in the same year moved back to the Astoria Ballroom where he led a twelve piece band. With broadcasting, recording and annual tours in addition to the resident work the band became highly popular over the next few years.In the 1950s Loss was resident band leader at the Hammersmith Palais and was remembered by a trainee nurse at Hammersmith Hospital as being as kind and gentlemanly when she attended him in hospital as in his public persona. His band's signature tune "In the Mood" would often be requested three or more times a night.

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John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

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John Dunbar (artist)
John Dunbar (born in 1943 in Mexico City) is a British artist, collector and former gallerist best known for his connections to the 1960s art and music scene.
Dunbar was born in Mexico City in 1943, the son of the British filmmaker, Robert Dunbar, He has three sisters, Marina Adams, architect, and twins Margaret Dunbar and Jennifer Dunbar. He spent his first four years in Moscow, where his father was a cultural attache, before the family returned to England. He attended Cambridge University, where he met the singer Marianne Faithfull. They were married on 6 May 1965, with Peter Asher as the best man and spent their honeymoon in Paris with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The couple lived in a flat at 29 Lennox Gardens, in Belgravia. On 10 November 1965, she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. She then "...left her husband to live with Mick Jagger..." telling the "New Musical Express that "my first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet."

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John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founder members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to raising his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.

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John Sinclair (poet)
John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941 in Flint, Michigan, United States) is an American poet from Detroit, one-time manager of the band MC5, and leader of the White Panther Party — a militantly anti-racist countercultural group of white socialists seeking to assist the Black Panthers in the Civil Rights movement — from November 1968 to July 1969. Sinclair attended the Flint College of the University of Michigan, now the University of Michigan-Flint. During his time at UM-Flint John served on the university's Publications Board, school newspaper "the word", and was the president of the Cinema Guild. He graduated in 1964.

Sinclair was involved in the reorganization of the Detroit underground newspaper, Fifth Estate, during the paper's growth in the late 1960s. Fifth Estate continues to publish to this day, making it one of the longest continuously published alternative periodicals in the United States. Sinclair also contributed to the formation of Detroit Artists Workshop Press, which published five issues of Work magazine. Sinclair worked as a jazz writer for Down Beat magazine from 1964 to 1965, being an outspoken advocate for the newly emerging Free Jazz Avant Garde movement. Sinclair was one of the "New Poets" who read at the seminal Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965.

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Johnny Hutchinson
Johnny 'Hutch' Hutchinson (born 18 July 1940 in Malta), also known as Johnny Hutch, was a Liverpudlian rock and roll drummer of the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the same time that The Beatles rose through the ranks of British rock bands. Hutch's group, The Big Three, were rivals of the Beatles, and his opinions of them were not the highest; one early remark he made was that the Beatles "weren't worth a carrot."
Feelings aside, Hutch sat in with them during a 1960 audition, keeping a beat until their then-drummer Tommy Moore could arrive. Mersey Beat magazine editor, Bill Harry, claimed that the vacant drummer position in The Beatles when Pete Best was dismissed was initially offered by Epstein to Johnny, who Epstein later managed. Knowing The Beatles had secured a record contract, Hutchinson turned down the job, saying, "Brian asked me to join the Beatles and I said, I wouldn’t join the Beatles for a gold clock. There’s only one group as far as I’m concerned and that’s the Big Three. The Beatles can’t make a better sound than that, and Pete Best is a very good friend of mine. I couldn’t do the dirty on him". Johnnny did play for The Beatles when Pete Best naturally never turned up on the evening of his dismissal, and two subsequent bookings, until second choice Ringo Starr could join The Beatles from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

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Johnny Mandel
Johnny Mandel (November 23, 1925) is an American composer and arranger of popular songs, film music and jazz. Among the musicians he has worked with are Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Anita O'Day, Barbra Streisand, and Shirley Horn.
Born John Alfred Mandel, New York, N.Y., to Alfred, a garment manufacturer, and Hannah, an opera singer, who discovered when he was aged 5 that he had perfect pitch. Piano lessons ensued but Johnny switched to the trumpet and later the trombone. Mandel married Martha Blanner in 1970 and has a daughter, Marrisa, born in 1976.
He studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. In 1943 he played the trumpet with Joe Venuti, in 1944 with Billy Rogers and trombone in the bands of Boyd Raeburn, Jimmy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, Georgie Auld and Chubby Jackson. In 1949 he accompanied the singer June Christy in the orchestra of Bob Cooper. From 1951 till 1953 he played and arranged music in Elliot Lawrence's orchestra, and in 1953 with Count Basie. Later he resided in Los Angeles, where he played the bass trumpet for Zoot Sims. A 1944 Band graduate of New York Military Academy, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, he wrote jazz compositions like "Not Really the Blues" for Woody Herman in 1949, "Hershey Bar" (1950) and "Pot Luck" (1953) for Stan Getz, "Straight Life" (1953) and "Low Life" (1956) for Count Basie as well as "Tommyhawk" (1954) for Chet Baker.

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Jon Wiener
Jon (Jonathan M.) Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles. He is notable for waging a successful 25-year legal battle to win the release of the John Lennon FBI files. A professor of United States history at University of California, Irvine , he is also a contributing editor to The Nation and host of a radio program in Los Angeles. His most recent book is How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America, which is scheduled for publication in October 2012.
Wiener was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he graduated from Central High School. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he worked with Barrington Moore, Jr. and Michael Walzer, and also wrote for the underground paper The Old Mole.
At the University of California, Irvine, Wiener teaches history courses on “American Politics: FDR to Obama” and “Cold War Culture.” Wiener’s scholarly works have been published in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, and Past & Present.

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João Gilberto
João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, known as João Gilberto (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈʒwɐ̃w ʒiwˈbɛʁtu]; June 10, 1931), is a Brazilian singer and guitarist. His seminal recordings, including many songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, established the new musical genre of Bossa nova in the late 1950s.
João Gilberto was born in Juazeiro, Bahia. From an early age, music was a part of Gilberto's life. His grandfather bought him his first guitar at the age of 14. During high school, Gilberto teamed up with some of his classmates to form a small band. Gilberto, who led the band, was influenced by Brazilian popular songs, American jazz, and even some opera, among other genres. After trying his luck as a radio singer in Salvador, Bahia, the young Gilberto was recruited in 1950 as lead singer of the vocal quintet Garotos da Lua (Moon Boys) and moved to Rio de Janeiro. A year and a half later, he was dismissed from the group for his lack of discipline (he would often show up late to rehearsals or not at all).

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Judy Garland
Judy Garland (June 10, 1922 – June 22, 1969) was an American actress, singer and vaudevillian. Renowned for her contralto voice, she attained international stardom through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage. Respected for her versatility, she received a Juvenile Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award, as well as Grammy Awards and a Special Tony Award. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the remake of A Star is Born and for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg. At 39 years of age, she remains the youngest recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the motion picture industry.
After appearing in vaudeville with her two older sisters, Garland was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. There she made more than two dozen films, including nine with Mickey Rooney and the 1939 film with which she would be most identified, The Wizard of Oz. After 15 years, she was released from the studio but gained renewed success through record-breaking concert appearances, including a return to acting beginning with critically acclaimed performances.

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Julia Baird
Julia Baird (née Dykins) (born 5 March 1947) is the eldest daughter of John 'Bobby' Albert Dykins (1918 - December 1965) and Julia Lennon (12 March 1914 – 15 July 1958). Baird's older half-brother was late English musician John Lennon; she also had an older half-sister, Ingrid Pederson. Her younger sister was Jacqueline 'Jacqui' Dykins (born 26 October 1949).
Lennon started visiting the Dykins' house in 1951. After the death of Julia Lennon in 1958, Harriet and Norman Birch were appointed guardians of Julia and Jacqui, ignoring Dykins' parentage, as he had never legally married their mother. Lennon invited the Dykins sisters to visit after the success of The Beatles, when he was living in Kenwood, Weybridge, with his wife, Cynthia Lennon.
Julia Dykins (Baird) married Allen Baird in 1968 and moved to Belfast. They had three children together but were divorced in 1981. Baird worked as a special needs teacher, and after Lennon's death she wrote John Lennon, My Brother (with Geoffrey Giuliano) and gave up working in 2004 to write Imagine This - Growing up with my brother John Lennon. She is now a director of Cavern City Tours in Liverpool.

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Julia Lennon
Julia Lennon (née Stanley; 12 March 1914 – 15 July 1958) was the mother of English musician John Lennon, who was born during her marriage to Alfred Lennon. After complaints to Liverpool's Social Services by her eldest sister, Mimi Smith (née Stanley), she handed over the care of her son to her sister. She later had one daughter after an affair with a Welsh soldier, but the baby was given up for adoption after pressure from her family. She then had two daughters, Julia and Jackie, with John 'Bobby' Dykins. She never divorced her husband, preferring to live as the common-law wife of Dykins for the rest of her life.
She was known as being high-spirited and impulsive, musical, and having a strong sense of humour. She taught her son how to play the banjo and ukulele, and bought his first acoustic guitar, even though her eldest sister strongly disapproved. She kept in almost daily contact with Lennon, and when he was in his teens he often stayed overnight at her and Dykins' house. On 15 July 1958, she was struck down and killed by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, close to her sister's house at 251 Menlove Avenue. Lennon was traumatised by her death and wrote several songs about her, including "Julia" and "Mother." Biographer Ian MacDonald wrote that she was, "to a great extent... her son's muse."

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Julian Lennon
John Charles Julian Lennon (born 8 April 1963) is a British musician, songwriter, actor, and photographer. He is the son of John Lennon and Lennon's first wife, Cynthia Powell. Beatles manager Brian Epstein was his godfather. He has a younger half-brother, Sean Lennon. Lennon was named after his paternal grandmother, Julia. He remains close friends with his father's former bandmate Paul McCartney.
Julian directly inspired three Beatles songs: "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Hey Jude" and "Good Night". He is also devoted to philanthropic endeavors, most notably his own White Feather Foundation and the Whaledreamers Organization, both of which promote the co-existence of all species and the health and well-being of the Earth.
His sixth studio album Everything Changes was released on 3 October 2011.
Julian Lennon was born in Liverpool. Initially, the fact that John Lennon was married and had a child was concealed from the public, in keeping with the conventional wisdom of the era that female teenage fans would not be as enamoured of married male pop stars.

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Jürgen Vollmer

Jürgen Vollmer, with Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voorman (the "Exis"), befriended The Beatles during the band's time in Hamburg in the early 1960s. Vollmer was the son of a professional army officer who died during World War II. Young Vollmer was attending Hamburg's Institute of Fashion at the time he met The Beatles, who at the time included drummer Pete Best and bassist Stu Sutcliffe. Vollmer quickly became one of the group's photographers, and was responsible for the "Beatles haircut" and some of their most iconic images in their leather-clad days prior to Brian Epstein. John Lennon was particularly impressed with Vollmer's photos, and used one of his favourites on the cover of his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll. During the time Vollmer lived in the USA, he worked as a set photographer in several Hollywood film productions.

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Kaiserkeller
Kaiserkeller is a night club in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg, Germany, near the Reeperbahn. It was opened by Bruno Koschmider on October 14, 1959. The Beatles had a contract with Kaiserkeller to play there in 1960.
A Caribbean steel band that had played at Allan Williams Jacaranda club in Liverpool took an offer to play in Hamburg. After receiving letters enthusing about Hamburg's club scene, Williams made contact with Koschmider, offering to act as a booking agent, to which Koschmider agreed. Koschmider had previously booked Derry and the Seniors after seeing them perform in London, and as they were successful in Hamburg, he asked Williams to look for additional groups.Rory Storm and The Hurricanes were Williams' first choice, but as they were committed to a season at Butlins holiday camp, they turned his offer down (as did Gerry & The Pacemakers) so Williams sent The Beatles to Hamburg instead. They were required to play six or seven hours a night, seven nights a week. The Beatles first played at Koschmider's Indra club, sleeping in small, "dirty" rooms in the Bambi Kino, and then moved (after the closure of the Indra) to the larger Kaiserkeller.

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Keith Richards
Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English musician and songwriter, and a founder member of The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine said Richards has created "rock's greatest single body of riffs", and has named him the 4th greatest guitarist of all time. Fourteen songs written by Richards and songwriting partner Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones' lead vocalist, are listed among Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Richards' notoriety for illicit drug use stems in part from several drug busts during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Keith Richards is the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards. He was born at Livingston Hospital in Dartford, Kent. His father was a factory worker injured in World War II during the Normandy invasion.
Richards' paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders whose family originated from Wales. His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore Dupree, who toured Britain with a jazz big band, "Gus Dupree and his Boys", fostered Richards' interest in guitar.

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Ken Mansfield
Ken Mansfield is a Grammy Award-winning record producer, former U.S. Manager of Apple Records, a high-ranking executive for several record labels, songwriter and the author of three books.
Since the 1960s, Mansfield has been associated with an array of notable performers including The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Waylon Jennings, James Taylor, Roy Orbison, Don Ho, the Imperials, Tompall Glaser, Harry Nilsson, Glen Campbell, Buck Owens, Lou Rawls, Andy Williams, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Eric Burdon, Badfinger, Ray Stevens, Jackie Lomax, The Four Freshmen, Judy Garland, Dolly Parton, David Cassidy, Nick Gilder, Claudine Longet and Jessi Colter. In the 1970s, he helped popularize the Outlaw movement in country music by producing Waylon Jennings' top-selling album, Are You Ready for the Country as well as the crossover hit "I’m Not Lisa" by Jessi Colter. In 2000, the former record executive-turned-producer embarked on a literary career with The Beatles, The Bible and Bodega Bay. His follow-up, The White Book - The Beatles, the Bands, the Biz: An Insider's Look at an Era, was released in 2007. Mansfield's third book, Between Wyomings, published by Thomas Nelson, was released on June 9, 2009.

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Ken Scott
Ken Scott (born 20 April 1947 in London) is an English record producer and recording engineer.
Scott started at the age of 16 working in the tape library at Abbey Road Studios. He became a recording engineer working with such acts as The Beatles, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Procol Harum.
Scott moved to Trident Studios where he worked with such artists as Elton John, Harry Nilsson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, America and with George Harrison on the 6x platinum selling album All Things Must Pass.
Scott went on to co-produce David Bowie's albums Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Aladdin Sane (1973) and Pin Ups (1973) before producing Supertramp, The Tubes, Dixie Dregs, Devo, Missing Persons, Kansas, Happy The Man and Level 42.
More recently Scott has recorded a number of legendary drummers for a VST instrument called EpiK Drums – A Ken Scott Collection.
Scott received a Clio award for "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke", and two Grammy nominations.

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Ken Townsend
Ken Townsend MBE is a renowned English sound engineer who played an important role at Abbey Road Studios. He worked on several Beatles albums, such as Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1966 he invented automatic double tracking (ADT). He spent his whole working career at Abbey Road, and retired as the Chairman of the Studio Group after 42 years of service.
During the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows, Lennon complained that he had always hated doing a second take to double the sound of his vocals, so Townsend, the studio technical manager, created the world's first ADT system by taking the signal from the playback and recording heads and delaying them slightly, thereby creating two sound images and not just one. By altering the speed and frequencies he could also create other different types of effects, which The Beatles used throughout the recording of Revolver.

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Larry Mullen, Jr.
Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Mullen, Jr. (born 31 October 1961) is an Irish musician best known as the drummer for the Irish rock band U2. He is the founder of U2, which he later described as "'The Larry Mullen Band' for about ten minutes, then Bono walked in and blew any chance I had of being in charge." He has worked on numerous side projects during his career, including a collaboration with Michael Stipe and Mike Mills of R.E.M. to form Automatic Baby in 1993 and working with bandmate Adam Clayton on the re-recording of the theme to Mission: Impossible, in 1996. He and U2 have won many awards, including 22 Grammy awards.
Mullen, the middle child and only son of Larry and Maureen Mullen, was born 31 October 1961 in Artane, Dublin, Ireland. Mullen began drumming in 1970, at the age of 9, under the instruction of Irish drummer Joe Bonnie and, later, Bonnie's daughter Monica. His mother died in a car accident in November 1978, two years after U2 was founded.

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Larry Parnes
Laurence Maurice "Larry" Parnes (1930 - 4 August 1989) was an English pop manager and impresario. He has been described as "the first major British rock manager... Parnes' stable encompassed most of the most successful pre-Beatles British rock singers."
Parnes was born in Willesden, London. After leaving school he began work in a clothing store, and by the age of 18 ran a women's clothing shop in Romford, Essex. He then bought a share in a bar in Romilly Street, Soho. He agreed to invest in a touring play, The House of Shame, which became both successful and notorious in 1954 after its publicist, John Kennedy, persuaded two actresses to stand outside the theatre dressed as prostitutes. In 1956, with Kennedy, he started to manage young rock and roll singer Tommy Hicks, who anglicised the name of his Swedish grandfather to become known as Tommy Steele. Steele achieved popular success, some of his songs being co-written by Parnes' friend Lionel Bart, and Parnes succeeded in presenting Steele as an "all-round entertainer".

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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM (

/ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.

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Lee Eastman
Lee Eastman, born Leopold Vail Epstein, (12 January 1910 - 30 July 1991) was a New York show business attorney, and art collector the son of Louis (b. Russia ~1887, imm. 1906) and Stella (Freyer) Epstein. His sisters were Emmaline and Rose. He married Louise Lindner, heiress to the Lindner Department Store fortune; they had four children, including John Eastman and Linda McCartney, the late wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney. Eastman became McCartney's business manager shortly before the breakup of The Beatles while his son John represented McCartney during his 1970 lawsuit to legally dissolve the Beatles. He is the maternal grandfather of potter Heather McCartney, photographer Mary McCartney, fashion designer Stella McCartney, and musician/sculptor James Louis McCartney. Eastman was also the friend and longtime lawyer for and collector of the works of the Abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning.
When the Beatles' company Apple Corps was in business trouble early in 1969, Eastman and Allen Klein were both considered to take the reins of the company, and of the band's careers. John Lennon favoured Klein. Lennon said he was impressed that Klein knew Lennon's lyrics, and understood them, and that Klein was very intelligent.George Harrison and Ringo Starr chose Klein, though Lennon said in 1970 that he maneuvered Klein into Apple. McCartney wanted Eastman, but was out-voted 3-1. For a short period, Klein managed Apple and the personal careers of Lennon, Harrison, and Starr while Eastman was the corporate counsel and managed McCartney. The Klein/Eastman combination did not work, and after a contentious meeting, Eastman was out. Subsequent disagreements over decisions made by Klein and the other Beatles prompted McCartney—represented by Eastman—to sue them to dissolve the partnership, and he eventually succeeded.

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Leslie Bricusse
Leslie Bricusse (born 29 January 1931) is an English composer, lyricist, and playwright.
Although best known for his partnership with Anthony Newley, Bricusse has worked with many other composers. He was educated at University College School in London and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge University, he was Secretary of Footlights between 1952 and 1953 and Footlights President during the following year. He currently lives in California in the United States, and he is married to the actress Yvonne Romain.
Sammy Davis, Jr. had hits with two of Bricusse's songs - "What Kind of Fool Am I?" (from Stop the World - I Want to Get Off) and the #1 hit "The Candy Man" (from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory). Other recording artists who have had popular success with his songs include Matt Monro and Frank Sinatra ("My Kind of Girl"), Shirley Bassey ("Goldfinger"), Harry Secombe ("If I Ruled the World"), Nancy Sinatra ("You Only Live Twice"), Maureen McGovern ("Can You Read My Mind"), and Diana Krall ("When I Look in Your Eyes"). Bricusse also partnered with George Tipton to write the opening theme of the U.S. television series It's a Living.

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Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (

/ˈtʃɑrlz ˈlʌtwɪdʒ ˈdɒdʒsən/ CHARLZ LUDT-wij DOJ-sən; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (/ˈkærəl/ KARR-əl), was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand.
Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. His mother's name was Frances Jane Lutwidge.

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Lord Beeching
Richard Beeching, Baron Beeching (21 April 1913 – 23 March 1985), commonly known as Dr Beeching, was chairman of British Railways and a physicist and engineer. He became a household name in Britain in the early 1960s for his report "The Reshaping of British Railways", commonly referred to as 'The Beeching Report', which led to far-reaching changes in the railway network, popularly known as the Beeching Axe. As a result of the report, just over 4,000 route miles were cut on cost and efficiency grounds, leaving Britain with 13,721 miles (22,082 km) of railway lines in 1966. A further 2,000 miles (3,200 km) were lost by the end of the 1960s.
Beeching was born in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, the second of four brothers. His father was a reporter with the Kent Messenger newspaper, his mother a schoolteacher and his maternal grandfather a dockyard worker. Shortly after his birth, Beeching's family moved to Maidstone where his brothers Kenneth (who was killed in the Second World War) and John were born. All four Beeching boys attended the local Church of England primary school, Maidstone All Saints, and won scholarships to Maidstone Grammar School, where Richard was a prefect. Beeching and his elder brother Geoffrey attended Imperial College of Science & Technology in London where both read physics and took First Class honours degrees. His younger brothers both attended Downing College, Cambridge.

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Lorne Michaels
Lorne Michaels, CM (born November 17, 1944) is a Canadian-American television producer, writer, and comedian best known for creating and producing Saturday Night Live and producing the various film and TV projects that spun off from it.
Michaels was born Lorne David Lipowitz in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of Florence (née Becker) and Henry Abraham Lipowitz, a furrier. He was the eldest of the Lipowitz children. He has a sister, Barbara Lipowitz, who currently resides in Toronto, and a brother, Mark Lipowitz, who died from a brain tumor. Michaels attended the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto and graduated from University College, University of Toronto, where he majored in English, in 1966. Michaels began his career as a writer and broadcaster for CBC Radio. He moved to Los Angeles from Toronto in 1968 to work as a writer for Laugh-In and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. He starred with Hart Pomerantz in The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, a Canadian comedy series which ran briefly in the early 1970s. During the late 1960s, Michaels married Rosie Shuster, who later worked with him on Saturday Night Live as a writer. She was the daughter of Frank Shuster, one half of the famous comedy team, Wayne and Shuster. Michaels and Shuster were divorced in 1980.

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Magic Alex
Yanni (later John) Alexis Mardas (Greek: Αλέξης Μάρδας; born May 5, 1942, Athens, Greece), better known as Magic Alex, the name given him by The Beatles when he knew the group between 1965 and 1969, is a self-styled electronics wizard and one-time head of The Beatles' Apple Electronics.
Mardas arrived in England in 1965, exhibiting his Kinetic Light Sculptures at the Indica Gallery. Mardas impressed John Lennon with the Nothing Box; a small plastic box with randomly blinking lights, and said that he could build a 72-track tape machine, so was given the job of designing the new Apple Studio in Savile Row. He was involved in the hasty departure of Lennon and George Harrison from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India, and Lennon's divorce of his first wife, Cynthia Lennon.
In the 1970s, the anti-terrorism industry offered bullet-proof vehicles, bugging devices and security hardware, and Mardas set up various companies offering these products to royalty and VIPs. King Hussein of Jordan bought a fleet of cars that Mardas had customised, but the cars proved to be more life-threatening than ordinary cars, as bullets easily pierced the supposed armour-plating, and the glass splintered. In 1987, Mardas was a managing director of Alcom Ltd, which specialised in electronic communications and security. He now lives in Greece.

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Mal Evans
Malcolm Frederick 'Mal' Evans (27 May 1935 – 5 January 1976) was best known as the road manager, assistant, and a friend of The Beatles.
In the early 1960s, Evans was employed as a telephone engineer, and also worked part-time as a bouncer at the Cavern Club, where The Beatles performed. Manager Brian Epstein later hired Evans as their assistant road manager, in tandem with Neil Aspinall. Evans was tall and heavily-built, and Peter Brown (one of Epstein's staff) later wrote of Evans as "a kindly, but menacing-looking young man". Evans contributed to many Beatle recordings, and appeared in some of the films they made. Although The Beatles stopped touring in 1966, Evans carried on assisting the band until their 1970 break-up. From 1969 forward, Evans had also found work as a record producer (most notably with Badfinger's top 10 hit "No Matter What"), and as an occasional songwriter.
Evans was killed by police on 5 January 1976 at his home in Los Angeles. Officers were called when his girlfriend phoned the police and told them that Evans was confused and had a gun. The police believed that the air rifle Evans was holding was a rifle and shot him dead.

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Mark David Chapman
Mark David Chapman (born May 10, 1955) is an American prison inmate who was convicted of murdering former Beatles member John Lennon on December 8, 1980. He killed Lennon outside The Dakota apartment building in New York City. Chapman fired at Lennon five times, hitting him four times in the back. He then remained at the scene reading the book The Catcher in the Rye until police arrived. He repeatedly claimed that the novel was his statement.
Chapman's legal team put forward an insanity defense based on expert testimony that he was in a delusional and possibly psychotic state at the time, but nearing the trial Chapman instructed his lawyer to plead guilty based on what he had decided was the will of God. Judge Edwards allowed the plea change without further psychiatric assessment, and sentenced Chapman to a prison term of 20 years to life with a stipulation that mental health treatment be provided. Chapman remains imprisoned at the Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York, having been denied parole six times.

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Mark Lewisohn
Mark Lewisohn (born 16 June 1958) is an English author and historian, regarded as the world's leading authority on the English rock band The Beatles.
Over the course of his career, Mark Lewisohn has worked for EMI, MPL Communications and Apple, and has written many reference books about The Beatles. He has been referred to as the world's leading authority on the subject, renowned for his meticulous research and integrity. He is credited with discovering such facts as the precise date when John Lennon first met Paul McCartney.
In 1986, Lewisohn's book The Beatles Live! was published. This featured a complete history of all the Beatles' live performances, in a format which Lewisohn would follow for his subsequent books. After being invited by EMI to listen to all of The Beatles' original session tapes, Lewisohn wrote The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years, which was published in 1987. The book was in the form of a diary, detailing every recording session The Beatles had at Abbey Road Studios chronologically. It included details such as who played on each track and how many takes were recorded in each session. The book featured an introductory interview by Paul McCartney.

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Maureen Cleave
Maureen Cleave (born 1941) is an English journalist who worked for the London Evening News and London Evening Standard in the 1960s, conducting interviews with famous musicians of the era, including Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
In her interview with Lennon on March 4, 1966, she quoted him as saying that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now".
According to the Bob Spitz biography of the Beatles, Lennon admitted to a liaison with Cleave, inspiring the Beatles song Norwegian Wood.

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Maureen Starkey
Maureen "Mo" Starkey Tigrett, née Mary Cox, (4 August 1946 – 30 December 1994) was the first wife of The Beatles' drummer, Ringo Starr. She met Starr at The Cavern Club, where The Beatles were playing, when she was a trainee hairdresser in Liverpool. Starr proposed marriage at the Ad-Lib Club in London, on 20 January 1965. They were married at the Caxton Hall Register Office, London, in 1965, but were divorced in 1975.
First living at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, the Starrs bought Sunny Heights, in St George's Hill, Weybridge. In 1973, they bought Tittenhurst Park from John Lennon. They had three children together: Zak, Jason, and a daughter, Lee. As a favour to Starr, Frank Sinatra recorded a special version of "The Lady Is a Tramp", for her 22nd birthday in 1968.
She started living with Isaac Tigrett in 1976—one of the founders of the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues—and married him in 1989. They had one daughter, Augusta. Maureen died at home of leukaemia on 30 December 1994, after receiving treatment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Her four children, mother, husband and ex-husband Starr were at her bedside when she died.

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Max Bygraves
Max Bygraves OBE (born Walter William Bygraves on 16 October 1922) is an English comedian, singer, actor and variety performer. He appeared on his own television shows, sometimes performing comedy sketches between songs. Shows he presented included the gameshow Family Fortunes.
Max Bygraves was born the son of poor parents in Rotherhithe, southeast London docklands. His father was a professional boxer known as Battling Tom Smith, and a casual dockworker.
He protrayed Charley Moon in the film of the same name.
Bygraves married WAAF sergeant Gladys (known as Blossom) Murray in 1942. The couple have three children: Christine, Anthony, and Maxine. Bygraves also has three other children: John Rice, Beverly Mayhew-Sass, and Stephen Rose.
Bygraves and his wife moved from Bournemouth to Queensland, Australia, in 2008. She died there in 2011, aged 88.

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May Pang
May Fung Yee Pang (born October 24, 1950) is best known as the former girlfriend of John Lennon. She had previously worked as a personal assistant and production coordinator for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono.
In 1973, Lennon and Ono separated, and Lennon and Pang had a relationship that lasted over 18 months, which Lennon later referred to as his "Lost Weekend." Pang produced two books about their relationship: a memoir called Loving John (Warner, 1983) and a book of photographs, Instamatic Karma (St. Martins, 2008).
Pang was married to producer Tony Visconti from 1989 to 2000 and had two children, Sebastian and Lara.
Pang is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and grew up in New York's Spanish Harlem area with an elder sister and an adopted brother (both of whom were born in China). Pang's mother had a laundry business in the area, but the Pang family left when the tenements where they lived were scheduled to be torn down, and moved to an apartment near 97th Street and 3rd Avenue, in Manhattan.

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Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Often referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records. His contribution to music, dance, and fashion, along with a much-publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene along with his brothers as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1964, and began his solo career in 1971.
In the early 1980s, Jackson became a dominant figure in popular music. The music videos for his songs, including those of "Beat It", "Billie Jean", and "Thriller", were credited with transforming the medium into an art form and a promotional tool, and the popularity of these videos helped to bring the relatively new television channel MTV to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made him a staple on MTV in the 1990s. Through stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk, to which he gave the name. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style influenced numerous hip hop, post-disco, contemporary R&B, pop and rock artists.

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Michael Omartian
Michael Omartian (born November 26, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, keyboardist, and music producer. He has been a participant in numerous albums, during a career that has spanned over 38 years. He is the first producer in recording history to have No. 1 records in three consecutive decades. He is a multiple Grammy Award winner, including a Grammy for keyboardist of the year. He spent five years on the A&R staff of ABC/Dunhill Records, as a producer, artist and arranger. He was subsequently hired by Warner Bros. Records as a producer and A&R staff member. Michael moved from Los Angeles to Nashville in 1993, where he served on the Board of Governors of the Recording Academy and has helped to shape the curriculum for the first Master’s Degree program in the field of Music Business at Belmont University.
Michael has produced albums for several artists including Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard, Christopher Cross, Michael Bolton, Whitney Houston, the Jacksons, Trisha Yearwood, Clint Black, Donna Summer, Joe "Bean" Esposito, Peter Cetera, Benny Hester, Steve Camp, The Imperials, Amy Grant, and Steely Dan. In 1985 Michael Omartian, along with Quincy Jones, co-produced the No. 1 hit "We Are the World" by a supergroup of popular musicians billed as USA for Africa.

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Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger, (born 26 July 1943) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor, best known as the lead vocalist and a founder member of The Rolling Stones.
Jagger's career has spanned over fifty years. Allmusic has described Jagger as "one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll". His distinctive voice and performance, along with Keith Richards' guitar style, have been the trademark of The Rolling Stones throughout the career of the band. In 1989, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with The Rolling Stones.
Jagger gained much press notoriety for admitted drug use and romantic involvements, and was often portrayed as a counterculture figure. In the late 1960s Jagger began acting in films (starting with Performance and Ned Kelly), to mixed reception. In 1985, Jagger released his first solo album, She's the Boss, and was knighted in 2003. In early 2009, he joined the eclectic supergroup SuperHeavy.
Jagger was born into a middle class family at Livingstone Hospital, in Dartford, Kent, England. His father, Basil Fanshawe ("Joe") Jagger (13 April 1913 – 11 November 2006), and his grandfather David Ernest Jagger were both teachers. His mother, Eva Ensley Mary (née Scutts; 6 April 1913 – 18 May 2000), born in New South Wales, Australia, was a hairdresser and an active member of the Conservative Party. Jagger is the elder of two sons (his brother Chris Jagger was born on 19 December 1947) and was raised to follow in his father's career path.

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Mimi Smith
Mary Elizabeth "Mimi" Smith (née Stanley) (24 April 1903 – 6 December 1991) was the maternal aunt and parental guardian of the English musician John Lennon. Mimi was born in Liverpool, England and was the oldest of five daughters. She became a resident trainee nurse at the Woolton Convalescent Hospital, and later worked as a private secretary. On 15 September 1939, she married George Smith, who ran his family's dairy farm and a shop in Woolton; a suburb of Liverpool.
After Mimi's younger sister, Julia Lennon, separated from her husband, she and her son (Lennon) moved in with a new partner, but Mimi contacted Liverpool's Social Services and complained about little John sleeping in the same bed as the two adults. Julia was eventually persuaded to hand the care of Lennon over to the Smiths. Lennon lived with them for most of his childhood, and remained close to her, even though she was highly dismissive of his musical ambitions, his girlfriends, and wives.
She often told the teenage Lennon that "The guitar's all right John, but you'll never make a living out of it". Despite later losing touch with other family members, Lennon kept in close contact and telephoned Mimi every week until his death in 1980. Lennon bought her a bungalow in Poole, Dorset, where she lived until her death in 1991. The Smiths' house in Liverpool was later donated to the The National Trust.

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Mitch Mitchell
John Ronald "Mitch" Mitchell (9 July 1947 – 12 November 2008) was an English drummer, best known for his work in The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Early in his career, Mitchell gained considerable musical experience touring and as a session musician. He also had an acting background, and had starred in a children's television programme, Jennings and Derbyshire, when he was a teenager. He became a musician through working for Jim Marshall at his drum shop on Saturdays while still at school. Pre-Experience bands included Frankie Reid and the Casuals (1962), Johnny Harris and the Shades, The Pretty Things, Bill Knight & The Sceptres, The Riot Squad, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and The Who as a session drummer while the band was deciding on a replacement (Keith Moon) for Doug Sandom.
Mitchell auditioned for Hendrix's band in October 1966, beating out drummers including Aynsley Dunbar, was their other final choice. Mitchell won the job on the flip of a coin.
Mitchell was praised for his work with the Jimi Hendrix Experience on the songs "Manic Depression", "Stepping Stone", "Little Miss Strange", "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", "Fire" and "Third Stone from the Sun". Mitchell came from a jazz background and like many of his contemporaries was influenced by Elvin Jones, Max Roach, and Joe Morello.

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Mona Best
Mona "Mo" Best (3 January 1924 – 9 September 1988) was born in India and is best known as the mother of Pete Best (b. 24 November 1941), who was an early member of The Beatles. Mona also had two other sons, Rory (born 1945) and Vincent "Roag" Best (born 1962). It was later confirmed that Roag's father was The Beatles' associate Neil Aspinall, although he was not registered as the father on Roag's birth certificate.
After moving to Liverpool from India, the Best family claim that Mona pawned all of her jewellery in 1954, and used the money to place a 33–1 bet on a horse named "Never Say Die", and used her winnings to buy a house in 1957. Mona later opened The Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the house as a venue for Rock 'n' Roll music. It was planned as a members-only club for her sons and their friends. The club was often referred to as The Casbah Club, or The Casbah.
The Quarrymen—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ken Brown—frequently played at The Casbah instead of the The Cavern Club, which had a jazz-only policy at that time. The Casbah Club cellar—with its original decoration—still exists. In 2006, the property was accorded a Grade II Heritage listing. Mona died in 1988, after a heart attack following a long illness.

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Murray the K
Murray Kaufman (February 14, 1922 – February 21, 1982), professionally known as Murray the K, was an influential rock and roll impresario and disc jockey of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. During the early days of Beatlemania, he frequently referred to himself as the fifth Beatle.
Murray Kaufman came from a show business family: his mother, Jean, played piano in vaudeville and wrote music and his aunt was a character actress on the stage and in film. He was a child actor - an extra - in several 1930s Hollywood films. He attended a military boarding school, and later was inducted into the United States Army where he arranged entertainment for the troops. Following the war, he put together shows in the Catskills' "Borscht Belt", also doing warm-ups for the headline performers.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worked in public relations and as a song plugger, helping to promote tunes like Bob Merrill's "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window." From there, he worked as a radio producer and co-host at WMCA (and briefly thereafter at WMGM), working with personalities such as Laraine Day on the late night interview program "Day At Night" and with Eva Gabor. At the same time, he was doing promotion for several baseball players, including Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, and his radio beginnings may be attributable to his connection with the New York Giants, whose manager, Leo Durocher, was the husband of Laraine Day. His work on those shows earned him his own late-night show that often featured his wife as co-host, as was popular at the time. For a while in the 1950s he was president of the National Conference of Disk Jockeys.

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Neil Aspinall
Neil Stanley Aspinall (13 October 1941 – 24 March 2008) was a British music industry executive. A school friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, he went on to head The Beatles' company Apple Corps.
The Beatles employed Aspinall as their road manager and personal assistant, which included driving his old Commer van to and from shows, both day and night. After Mal Evans started work for The Beatles, Aspinall was promoted to become their personal assistant, later becoming chief executive of their company, Apple Corps.
On behalf of Apple, Aspinall was involved in notable court cases against Allen Klein, EMI, and Apple Computer. He supervised the marketing of music, videos, and merchandising, as well being a director of Standby Films, which was run from his home in Twickenham, London. On 10 April 2007, Aspinall retired from Apple Corps. He died of lung cancer in New York City in 2008.
Aspinall was born in Prestatyn, North Wales, after his mother had been evacuated from the family home in Liverpool because of the air-raids on Liverpool during the Second World War, while Aspinall's father was away at sea with the Royal Navy. Aspinall and his mother returned to Liverpool later in 1942 after the bombing had subsided. Aspinall later attended West Derby School, where he passed his 11-plus exams. When he was twelve years old, Aspinall gained a place at the Liverpool Institute in Mount Street, and was in the same class as Paul McCartney for English and Art lessons.

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Nicky Hopkins
Nicholas Christian "Nicky" Hopkins (24 February 1944 – 6 September 1994) was an English pianist and organist.
Hopkins recorded and performed on many notable British and American pop and rock music releases from the 1960s through the 1990s including many notable Rolling Stones releases.
Hopkins was born in Perivale, Middlesex, England. His musical talent emerged early and he began playing piano at age three. He was initially tutored by a local piano teacher and in his teens he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. He suffered from Crohn's disease from his youth. Poor health and ongoing surgery made it difficult for him to tour. This resulted in his working primarily as a studio player for most of his career.
Hopkins' studies were interrupted in 1960 when he left school at 16 to became the pianist with Screaming Lord Sutch's Savages until, two years later, he and fellow Savages Bernie Watson, Rick Brown (Fenson) and Carlo Little, joined the renowned blues harmonica player Cyril Davies, who had just left Blues Incorporated, and became the Cyril Davies R&B All Stars. Hopkins played piano on their first single, Davies' much-admired theme tune "Country Line Special". However he was forced to leave the All Stars in May 1963 for a series of operations that almost cost him his life and was bed-ridden for nineteen months in his late 'teens. During his convalescence Davies died of leukaemia and The All Stars disbanded.

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Pattie Boyd
Patricia Anne "Pattie" Boyd (born 17 March 1944) is an English model, photographer and author. She began her fashion career in 1962, and worked in London, New York, and Paris, modelling in London, New York, and Paris (for Mary Quant and others), and was photographed by David Bailey, and Terence Donovan. She appeared on the cover of Vogue and wrote for 16 Magazine.
She is the former wife of musicians George Harrison and Eric Clapton, and claims that she was the inspiration for songs written by both musicians: Harrison's "Something", "I Need You", "For You Blue" and "Isn't It a Pity", and Clapton's "Layla", "Wonderful Tonight" and "Bell Bottom Blues".
An exhibition of photographs taken by Boyd during her relationships with Harrison and Clapton opened at the San Francisco, California San Francisco Art Exchange on February 14, 2005, titled Through the Eye of a Muse. They have been exhibited worldwide, including shows in San Francisco, Dublin, Sydney, Toronto, Moscow, London, and throughout the USA. Boyd's autobiography, Wonderful Today: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, was published in England on 23 August 2007 (in the U.S. as Wonderful Tonight).

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Paul Francis Webster
Paul Francis Webster (December 20, 1907 – March 18, 1984) was an American lyricist who won three Academy Awards for Best Song and was nominated sixteen times for the award.
He was born in New York City, the son of Myron Lawrence Webster and Blanche Pauline Stonehill Webster. He attended the Horace Mann School (Riverdale, Bronx, New York), graduating in 1926, and then went to Cornell University from 1927 to 1928 and New York University from 1928 to 1930, leaving without receiving a degree. He served in the United States Navy and then became a dance instructor at a studio in New York City. By 1931, however, he turned his career direction to writing song lyrics. His first professional lyric was Masquerade (music by John Jacob Loeb) which became a hit in 1932, performed by Paul Whiteman.
In 1935 Twentieth Century Fox signed him to a contract to write lyrics for Shirley Temple's films, but shortly afterward he went back to freelance writing. His first hit was a collaboration in 1941 with Duke Ellington on the song "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)".

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Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of the Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), he has been described by Guinness World Records as "The Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time", with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles. With John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, he gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and with Lennon formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. After leaving the Beatles, he began a solo career and later formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine.
According to the BBC, his Beatles song "Yesterday" has been covered by over 2,200 artists—more than any other song. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre", became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK, and he is "the most successful songwriter" in UK chart history, according to Guinness. As a songwriter or co-writer, he is included on thirty-one number one titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2012 he has sold over 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the United States.

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Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is a grammy award winning American singer-songwriter, poet and guitarist.
Simon's international fame and success began as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, launched in 1964 with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts: "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The duo split up in 1970 at the height of their popularity, and Simon began a successful solo career, recording three highly acclaimed albums over the next five years. In 1986, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony in 1980 and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman in 1998.
Simon has earned 12 Grammys for his solo and collaborative work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006 was selected as one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World" by Time magazine. Among many other honors, Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007. In 1986 Simon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees.

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Pete Best
Pete Best (born 24 November 1941) is a British musician, principally known as the original drummer in The Beatles. He was born in the city of Madras, which was then part of British India. After his mother moved to Liverpool in 1945, Best's mother, Mona Best (1924–1988), opened The Casbah Coffee Club, in the cellar of the Bests' large house in Liverpool, which became very popular, having a membership of over 1,000. The Beatles (at the time known as The Quarrymen) played some of their earliest concerts at the club. Best played there with his first band, The Black Jacks, and later with The Beatles.
Best was invited to join The Beatles on 12 August 1960, on the eve of the group's first Hamburg season of club dates. He was eventually replaced by Ringo Starr on 16 August 1962, when The Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, dismissed Best under the direction of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, following The Beatles' first recording session at Abbey Road Studios. After working in a number of commercially unsuccessful groups he gave up the music industry to work as a civil servant for twenty years, before starting The Pete Best Band. He has been married for over 45 years to Kathy Best; they have two daughters and four grandchildren. Best is sometimes referred to as the "Fifth Beatle".

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Pete Shotton
Peter Shotton (born 4 August 1941), commonly referred to as Pete Shotton, is an English businessman and former musician, best known for his long friendship with John Lennon of The Beatles. He was a close childhood friend of Lennon's, and attended Dovedale Infants School and Quarry Bank Grammar School at the same time as the future Beatle. The two boys were frequently in trouble with their teachers and with their headmaster, and they came to be known at Quarry Bank as "Shennon and Lotton" or "Lotton and Shennon."
In 1957, Shotton was Lennon's bandmate in The Quarrymen, playing percussion (specifically, a washboard), until Paul McCartney joined. He was "fired" from the band when, after confiding that he really did not enjoy playing, Lennon smashed the washboard over his head at a party. However, he remained a friend and confidant – as he became friends with all of the Beatles as the group formed.
After the Beatles became famous, Lennon and George Harrison bought a supermarket on Hayling Island, and gave it to Shotton to run. Later, he served as manager of the Apple Boutique, then as the first managing director of Apple Corps.

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Peter Shotton
Peter Shotton (born 4 August 1941), commonly referred to as Pete Shotton, is an English businessman and former musician, best known for his long friendship with John Lennon of The Beatles. He was a close childhood friend of Lennon's, and attended Dovedale Infants School and Quarry Bank Grammar School at the same time as the future Beatle. The two boys were frequently in trouble with their teachers and with their headmaster, and they came to be known at Quarry Bank as "Shennon and Lotton" or "Lotton and Shennon."
In 1957, Shotton was Lennon's bandmate in The Quarrymen, playing percussion (specifically, a washboard), until Paul McCartney joined. He was "fired" from the band when, after confiding that he really did not enjoy playing, Lennon smashed the washboard over his head at a party. However, he remained a friend and confidant – as he became friends with all of the Beatles as the group formed.
After the Beatles became famous, Lennon and George Harrison bought a supermarket on Hayling Island, and gave it to Shotton to run. Later, he served as manager of the Apple Boutique, then as the first managing director of Apple Corps.

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Phil Collins
Philip David Charles "Phil" Collins, LVO (born 30 January 1951) is an English singer-songwriter, drummer, pianist and actor best known as a drummer and vocalist for British progressive rock group Genesis and as a solo artist.
Collins sang the lead vocals on several chart hits in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1975 and 2010, either as a solo artist or with Genesis. His singles, sometimes dealing with lost love, ranged from the drum-heavy "In the Air Tonight", dance pop of "Sussudio", piano-driven "Against All Odds", to the political statements of "Another Day in Paradise".
Collins's professional music career began as a drummer, originally in a band called The Real Thing with Andrea Bertorelli, who later became his first wife. Collins played drums and shared lead vocals (with Brian Chatton) in Flaming Youth which recorded one album, (Ark II). In 1970, he took over drums for Genesis, which had already recorded two albums. In Genesis, Collins originally supplied backing vocals for front man Peter Gabriel, singing lead on only two songs: "For Absent Friends" from 1971's Nursery Cryme album and "More Fool Me" from Selling England by the Pound, which was released in 1973. Following Gabriel's departure in 1975, Collins became the group's lead singer.

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Phil McDonald
Philip McDonald is an English recording studio audio engineer, best known as the engineer for EMI and later for Apple during The Beatles studio years alongside with Neil Aspinall, Geoff Emerick, Mal Evans, and others. In Apple, McDonald joined as senior balance engineer. He was just 25. He was responsible at EMI for engineering work on albums by John Lennon, The Shadows, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Roy Harper and George Harrison.

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Phil Spector
Phillip Harvey "Phil" Spector (born Harvey Phillip Spector on December 26, 1939) is an American record producer and songwriter.
The originator of the "Wall of Sound" production technique, Spector was a pioneer of the 1960s girl-group sound and produced over 25 Top 40 hits in 1960–1965. Some of his famous girl groups are The Ronettes and The Crystals. After this initial success, Spector later worked with artists including Ike and Tina Turner, John Lennon, George Harrison, and the Ramones with similar acclaim. He produced The Beatles' Academy Award winning album Let It Be, and the Grammy Award–winning Concert for Bangladesh by former Beatle George Harrison. In 1989, Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer. The 1965 song "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", produced and co-written by Spector for The Righteous Brothers, is listed by BMI as the song with the most U.S. airplay in the 20th century.
In 2009 Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2003 shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in his Alhambra, California home. He is serving a prison sentence of 19 years to life.

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Quincy Jones
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, conductor, arranger, film composer, television producer, and trumpeter. His career spans five decades in the entertainment industry and a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend Award in 1991. He is particularly recognized as the producer of the album Thriller, by pop icon Michael Jackson, which has sold more than 110 million copies worldwide, and as the producer and conductor of the charity song “We Are the World”.
In 1968, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song "The Eyes of Love" from the Universal Pictures film Banning. That same year, he became the first African American to be nominated twice within the same year when he was nominated for Best Original Score for his work on the music of the 1967 film In Cold Blood. In 1971, Jones would receive the honor of becoming the first African American to be named musical director/conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. He was the first African American to win the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1995. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African American, each of them having seven nominations. At the 2008 BET Awards, Quincy Jones was presented with the Humanitarian Award. He was played by Larenz Tate in the 2004 biopic about Ray Charles, Ray.

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Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to with the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.
In 1956, he began to tour Europe and America playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continues to perform in the 2000s, often with his daughter Anoushka.

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Ray Coleman
Ray Coleman (15 June 1937 – 10 September 1996) was a British author and former Editor-in-chief of Melody Maker known for biographies of The Beatles. Besides Melody Maker, Coleman was a participant with music magazines including Disc, Black Music, and Musicians Only, and a contributor to magazines such as Billboard. An author or co-author of ten books, Coleman was near the completion of a Phil Collins biography at the time of his death. The book was completed and published in 1997.
He was the first journalist to be awarded a Gold Badge of Merit by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors for services to British music.
Coleman wrote or co-wrote the biographies of at least a dozen famous musicians. They include the following.

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Ray Connolly
Ray Connolly is an English novelist, screenwriter and journalist.
He is perhaps best known for writing the screenplays for the films That'll Be the Day and the sequel Stardust, for which he won a Writers Guild of Great Britain best screenplay award, and for his many interviews with the Beatles. He was due to interview John Lennon on the day the ex-Beatle was murdered, an event he wrote about in the BBC radio play Unimaginable. In addition to the biography John Lennon 1940-1980, he wrote the introduction to The Beatles Complete songbook.

Ray Connolly was born and brought up in Lancashire and educated at the London School of Economics where he read social anthropology. After entering journalism at the Liverpool Daily Post, he then moved to the London Evening Standard where he interviewed, among others, many Sixties and Seventies rock stars. Many of his interviews with the Beatles are collected in his eBook The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, while other interviews are collected in Stardust Memories - Talking About My Generation, which is also now available as an eBook

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Richard Lester
Richard Lester (born 19 January 1932) is an American film director based in Britain. Lester is notable for his work with The Beatles in the 1960s and his work on the Superman film series in the 1980s.
Lester was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A child prodigy, he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. He started in television in 1950, working as a stage hand, floor manager, assistant director, and then to director in less than a year, because no one else was around that knew how to do the work. In 1953, Lester moved to London and began work as a director in independent television, working for the legendary low cost television producers The Danziger Brothers on episodes of Mark Saber, a half-hour detective series.
A variety show he produced caught the eye of Peter Sellers, who enlisted Lester's help in translating The Goon Show to television as The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d. It was a hit, as were two follow-up shows, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred. Lester recalls that A Show Called Fred was "broadcast live and that's why I went into film directing where you can do a second take!"

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Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California. After completing his undergraduate work at Whittier College, he graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937, and returned to California to practice law. He and his wife, Pat Nixon, moved to Washington to work for the federal government in 1942. He subsequently served in the United States Navy during World War II. Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1950. His pursuit of the Hiss Case established his reputation as a leading anti-communist, and elevated him to national prominence. He was the running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party presidential nominee in the 1952 election. Nixon served for eight years as vice president. He waged an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy, and lost a race for Governor of California in 1962. In 1968, he ran again for the presidency and was elected.

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Ringo Starr
Richard Starkey, MBE (born 7 July 1940), better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the Beatles. When the band formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He joined the Beatles in August 1962, taking the place of Pete Best. In addition to his drumming, Starr is featured on lead vocals on a number of successful Beatles songs (in particular, "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Yellow Submarine", and the Beatles version of "Act Naturally"). He is credited as a co-writer of the songs "What Goes On" and "Flying", and as the writer of "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".
As drummer for the Beatles, Starr was musically creative, and his contribution to the band's music has received high praise from notable drummers in more recent times. Starr described himself as "your basic offbeat drummer with funny fills". Drummer Steve Smith said that Starr's popularity "brought forth a new paradigm" where "we started to see the drummer as an equal participant in the compositional aspect" and that Starr "composed unique, stylistic drum parts for The Beatles songs". In 2011, Starr was picked as the fifth-best drummer of all-time by Rolling Stone readers.

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Ronnie Scott
Ronnie Scott (28 January 1927 – 23 December 1996) was an English jazz tenor saxophonist and jazz club owner.
Ronnie Scott (originally Ronald Schatt) was born in Aldgate, east London, into a family of Russian Jewish descent on his father's side, and Portuguese antecedents on his mother's. Scott began playing in small jazz clubs at the age of sixteen. (His claim to fame being, he was taught to play by "Vera Lynn's father-in-law!") He toured with Johnny Claes, the trumpeter, from 1944 to 1945 and with Ted Heath in 1946, as well as working with Ambrose, Cab Kaye, and Tito Burns. He was involved in the short-lived musicians' co-operative Club Eleven band and club (1948–1950), with Johnny Dankworth and others, and was a member of the generation of British musicians who worked on the Cunard liner Queen Mary (intermittently 1946–c. 1950) in order to visit New York and hear the new music directly. Scott was among the earliest British musicians to be influenced in his playing style by Charlie Parker and other bebop musicians.

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Rory Storm
Rory Storm (21 September 1939 – 28 September 1972) was an English singer and musician. Born Alan Caldwell in Liverpool, Storm was the singer and leader of Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, a Liverpudlian band who were contemporaries of The Beatles in the late 1950s, and early 1960s. Ringo Starr was the drummer for The Hurricanes before joining The Beatles in August 1962.
The Hurricanes were one of the most popular acts on the Liverpool and Hamburg club scenes during their existence, although their attempt at a recording career was not successful. They released only two singles, the second one being a version of the West Side Story song "America", which was produced by The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein.
When Storm's father died, he returned from Amsterdam to Liverpool to be with his mother at Stormsville, at 54 Broadgreen Road, Broadgreen, Liverpool. On 27 September 1972, Storm developed a chest infection and could not sleep properly, so he took sleeping pills. The next day Storm and his mother were both found dead. A post mortem determined that Storm had not taken enough pills to kill himself, but it was suspected that his mother had, after finding her son's body.

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Rosaura Lopez
Rosaura Lopez Lorenzo (16 March 1932, Pontevedra, Spain – 19 September 2005, Pontevedra, Spain) was a maid of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the Dakota apartment between 1976 and 1980.
In 2005 she wrote a book in Spanish reflecting that period: En casa de John Lennon (meaning At John Lennon's House), Hercules Ediciones, ISBN 84-96314-18-9. The book contains photos of John, Yoko and Sean along with some postcards that John and Yoko sent to her. And anecdotes such as:
Rosaura arrived in Queens (New York) in 1962 with her husband Secundino and in 1970, she began work as a cleaner at the Dakota building. When Lennon arrived in 1976, her services were included as part of the rental package.

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Roy Halee
Roy Halee is an American record producer and engineer, best known for working with Simon and Garfunkel.
Halee grew up on Long Island, New York. His father, also named Roy Halee, provided the singing voice for Mighty Mouse in late 1940s Terrytoons cartoons, as well as the voices of Heckle and Jeckle from 1951 through 1961.
He was best known for producing several albums with Simon and Garfunkel, including the Grammy-winning Bridge Over Troubled Water. He is mentioned in their 1965 song "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)", written by Paul Simon. He has also worked with other groups such as The Byrds, Journey (on their first album Journey), Willie Nile, Laura Nyro, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Blue Angel.
Halee was named to the TEC Awards Hall of Fame in 2001.

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Sonny Burke
Sonny Burke (born Joseph Francis Burke; March 22, 1914, Scranton, Pennsylvania – May 31, 1980) was an accomplished musical arranger, composer, big band leader and producer. In 1937, he graduated from Duke University, where he had formed and led the jazz big band known as the Duke Ambassadors.
During the 1930s and 1940s he was a big band arranger in New York, worked with Sam Donahue's band, and during the 1940s and 1950s worked as an arranger for the Charlie Spivak and Jimmy Dorsey bands, among others. In 1955 he wrote, along with Peggy Lee, the songs to Disney's Lady and the Tramp. He also wrote songs with John Elliot for Disney's Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom which won the 1953 Oscar for Best Short Animated Feature.
He wrote the music for number of popular songs that continue to be regarded as 'standards'. These include, Black Coffee, with lyric by Paul Francis Webster, and "Midnight Sun" co-written with jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. The songs famous lyric was added later by Johnny Mercer. Burke was an active arranger, conductor and 'A and R man' [Artists and repertoire] in major Hollywood recording studios, including and especially Decca Records.

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Stan Getz
Stanley Getz (February 2, 1927 – June 6, 1991) was an American jazz saxophone player. Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone, his prime influence being the wispy, mellow timbre of his idol, Lester Young. Coming to prominence in the late 1940s with Woody Herman's big band, Getz is described by critic Scott Yanow as "one of the all-time great tenor saxophonists". Getz went on to perform in bebop, cool jazz and third stream, but is perhaps best known for popularizing bossa nova, as in the worldwide hit single "The Girl from Ipanema" (1964).
Getz was born on February 2, 1927, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Ukrainian Jews who emigrated from the Kiev area in 1903. The family later moved to New York City for better employment opportunities. Getz worked hard in school, receiving straight As, and finished sixth grade close to the top of his class. Getz's major interest was in musical instruments, and he felt a need to play every instrument in sight. He played a number of them before his father bought him his first saxophone at the age of 13. Even though his father also got him a clarinet, Getz instantly fell in love with the saxophone and began practicing eight hours a day.

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Steve Lukather
Steven Lee "Luke" Lukather (born October 21, 1957) is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, arranger, and record producer best known for his work with the rock band Toto. A prolific session musician, Lukather has recorded guitar tracks for more than 1,500 albums representing a broad array of artists and genres. He has also contributed to albums and hit singles as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. Lukather has released six solo studio albums and is working on his seventh.
In 1976, when Lukather was nineteen years old, he was invited by his high school friends David Paich and the Porcaro brothers Steve and Jeff to join them in forming their band, Toto. He remained a member until the band split up in 2008, and has been involved in their periodic reunion tours. Lukather's reputation as a guitarist and his association with Paich and Jeff Porcaro, who also became established artists, allowed him to secure a solid flow of session work in the 1970s and 1980s. Lukather has been nominated for twelve Grammy awards, and has won five. While his work with Toto was predominantly based on pop rock music and his solo work ventures into progressive rock and hard rock, many of Lukather's side-projects are focused on jazz fusion. He held a long-time collaboration with jazz guitarist Larry Carlton that produced a Grammy-winning live album, and he was a member of the jazz fusion band Los Lobotomys, a collaboration of notable session musicians.

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Steve Porcaro
Steven Maxwell "Steve" Porcaro (born September 2, 1957, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American keyboardist and composer, who was an original member of the rock/pop band Toto.
Porcaro wrote or co-wrote at least one song on each of Toto's first six albums, with the exception of Isolation. Unlike most of his bandmates, he generally did not contribute lead or even backing vocals; he considered himself a weak singer, and sang lead on two of his compositions only because he felt that the vocal styles of his bandmates, with the exception of Joseph Williams, were not appropriate for his songs. He left Toto in 1986 after the Fahrenheit album in order to pursue a more full-time songwriting and composing career. Porcaro composed the music for the song "Human Nature" from Michael Jackson's album Thriller, and also played with Gary Wright during his tour in 1977, supporting the latter's The Dream Weaver album.
However, Porcaro has continued working with Toto in various supporting capacities, assisting with keyboards, drum looping, synthesizers and arranging/composing. He has also done session musician work for many other acts, including Yes (on Union) and Jefferson Airplane (on their self-titled 1989 reunion album). He was also a member of Chris Squire's short lived band, The Chris Squire Experiment, in 1992.

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Stevie Wonder
Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.
Among Wonder's best known works are singles such as "Superstition", "Sir Duke", "I Wish" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You". Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.

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Strom Thurmond
James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was an American politician who served for 48 years as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes. Thurmond later represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Democrat and after 1964 as a Republican. He switched out of support for the conservatism of Republican presidential candidate and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who shared his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He left office as the only senator to reach the age of 100 while still in office and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history (although he was later surpassed in the latter by Robert Byrd). Thurmond holds the record for the longest-serving Dean of the United States Senate in U.S. history at 14 years.
He conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. In the 1960s, he continued to fight against civil rights legislation. He always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority. However, he infamously said that "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement", while attributing the movement for integration to Communism. Starting in the 1970s, he moderated his position on race, but continued to defend his early segregationist campaigns on the basis of states' rights in the context of Southern society at the time, never fully renouncing his earlier viewpoints.

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Stuart Sutcliffe
Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe (23 June 1940 – 10 April 1962) was a Scottish artist and musician, best known as the original bass player of The Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue a career as an artist, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with coming up with the name "The Beatles", as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, The Crickets. As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometimes referred to as the "Fifth Beatle".
When The Beatles played in Hamburg, he met photographer Astrid Kirchherr, to whom he was later engaged. He later enrolled in the Hamburg College of Art after leaving The Beatles, and studied under future pop art artist, Eduardo Paolozzi. He earned praise for his paintings, which mostly explored a style related to abstract expressionism. In 1962, Sutcliffe collapsed in the middle of an art class in Hamburg after complaining of head pains. German doctors performed various checks on him, but were unable to determine exactly what was causing the headaches. On 10 April 1962, he was taken to hospital, but died in the ambulance on the way.

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Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali (Punjabi, Urdu: طارق علی), (born 21 October 1943), is a British Pakistani military historian, novelist, journalist, filmmaker, public intellectual, political campaigner, activist, and commentator. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books.
He is the author of several books, including Pakistan: Military Rule or People's Power (1970), Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (1991), Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Bush in Babylon (2003), and Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002), A Banker for All Seasons (2007), The Duel (2008) and The Obama Syndrome (2010).
Ali was born and raised in Lahore. The city was part of British India at the time of his birth in 1943, but became part of the newly independent nation of Pakistan four years later. He is the son of journalist Mazhar Ali Khan and activist mother Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (daughter of Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan who led the Unionist Muslim League and was later Prime Minister of the Punjab from 1937–1942).

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The Edge
David Howell Evans (born 8 August 1961), more widely known by his stage name The Edge (or just Edge), is a musician best known as the guitarist, backing vocalist, and keyboardist of the Irish rock band U2. A member of the group since its inception, he has recorded 12 studio albums with the band and has released one solo record. As a guitarist, The Edge has crafted a minimalistic and textural style of playing. His use of a rhythmic delay effect yields a distinctive ambient, chiming sound that has become a signature of U2's music.
The Edge was born in England to a Welsh family, but was raised in Ireland after moving there as an infant. In 1976, at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, he formed U2 with his fellow students and his older brother Dik. Inspired by the ethos of punk rock and its basic arrangements, the group began to write its own material. They eventually became one of the most popular acts in popular music, with successful albums such as 1987's The Joshua Tree and 1991's Achtung Baby. Over the years, The Edge has experimented with various guitar effects and introduced influences from several genres of music into his own style, including American roots music, industrial music, and alternative rock. With U2, The Edge has also played keyboards, co-produced their 1993 record Zooropa, and occasionally contributed lyrics. The Edge met his second and current wife, Morleigh Steinberg, through her collaborations with the band.

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Tom Snyder
Thomas James "Tom" Snyder (May 12, 1936 – July 29, 2007) was an American television personality, news anchor and radio personality best known for his late night talk shows The Tomorrow Show, on the NBC television network in the 1970s and 1980s, and The Late Late Show, on the CBS Television Network in the 1990s. Snyder was also the pioneer anchor of the primetime NBC News Update, in the 1970s and early 1980s, which was a one-minute capsule of news updates in primetime.
Snyder was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to parents Frank and Marie Snyder. He received a Catholic upbringing and attended St. Agnes Elementary School and graduated from Jesuit-run Marquette University High School. He attended Marquette University, after which he had originally planned to study medicine and become a doctor.
Snyder had loved radio since he was a child and at some point changed his field of study from pre-med to journalism. He once told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Tim Cuprisin that broadcasting became more important to him than attending classes, and he skipped a lot of them. Snyder began his career as a radio reporter at WRIT (unrelated to the present-day FM station) in Milwaukee and at WKZO in Kalamazoo (where he was fired by John Fetzer) in the 1950s. For a time he worked at Savannah, Georgia AM station WSAV (now WBMQ).

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Tony Sheridan
Tony Sheridan (born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity on 21 May 1940 in Norwich, Norfolk), is an English rock and roll singer-songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as an early collaborator of The Beatles, (though the record was labelled as being with "The Beat Brothers"), one of two non-Beatles (the other being Billy Preston) to receive label performance credit on a record with the group, and the only non-Beatle to appear as lead singer on a Beatles recording which charted as a single.
In his early life, Sheridan was influenced by his parents' interest in classical music, and by age seven, he had learned to play the violin. He eventually came to play guitar, and in 1956, formed his first band. He showed enough talent that he soon found himself playing in London's "Two I's" club for some six months straight, but at the same time he also found himself reduced to sleeping in doorways. In 1958, at 18, he began appearing on the BBC's Oh Boy, playing electric guitar on such early Rock classics as "Blue Suede Shoes", "Glad All Over", "Mighty Mighty Man" and "Oh Boy!". Sheridan was soon viewed as a very promising guitarist and as such was employed backing a number of singers, reportedly including Gene Vincent and Conway Twitty while they were in England. Early in 1960, Sheridan performed in a package tour of the United Kingdom which also included Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. On April 17, Vincent and Cochran rebuffed his request to ride along with them to the next venue, but he thereby escaped the road accident which would leave Cochran dead and Vincent badly injured. He also played guitar for Cherry Wainer on her recording of "Happy Organ".

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Toto (band)
Toto is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1976. The group currently consists of Joseph Williams (lead vocals), David Paich (keyboards), Steve Porcaro (keyboards), Steve Lukather (guitars, vocals), Mike Porcaro (bass), and Simon Phillips (drums). Toto is known for a musical style that combines elements of pop, rock, soul, funk, progressive rock, hard rock, R&B and jazz. They are regularly associated with the soft rock genre.
David Paich and Jeff Porcaro had played together as session musicians on several albums and decided to form a band. David Hungate, Steve Lukather, Steve Porcaro and Bobby Kimball were recruited before their first album release. The band enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1970s and 1980s, beginning with the band's self-titled debut released in 1978. With the release of the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Toto IV (1982), Toto became one of the best-selling music groups of their era. They are best known for the Top 5 hits "Hold the Line", "Rosanna", "Africa" and "Georgy Porgy". Although their popularity in the United States diminished in the 1990s and 2000s, they remained popular internationally, playing only a small number of shows in the USA. Several changes to the lineup have been made over the years. In 2008, Lukather announced his departure from the band, and the remaining band members later went their separate ways. In the summer of 2010, Toto reformed and went on a short European tour, with a new lineup, to benefit Mike Porcaro, who had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

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Vaughn Meader
Abbott Vaughn Meader (March 20, 1936 – October 29, 2004) was an American comedian and impersonator whose fame after the release of the The First Family album spoofing President John F. Kennedy was equalled only by his obscurity after Kennedy's assassination in 1963.
Meader was born in Waterville, Maine during one of the worst floods ever to hit New England (he often said he was born on "the night the West Bridge washed out"). He was the only child of Charles Vaughn Meader, a millworker, and Mary Ellen Abbott. After his father broke his neck and drowned in a diving accident when Meader was only eighteen months old, his mother moved to Boston to work as a cocktail waitress, leaving Meader behind with relatives. A sometimes unruly and troubled child, Meader was sent to live with his mother in Boston at the age of five but she had become alcohol dependent and placed him in a children's home. After shuttling among several schools in Massachusetts and Maine, Meader eventually graduated from Brookline High School in 1953. He enlisted in the United States Army, and while stationed in Mannheim, West Germany, as a laboratory technician formed a country music band (the Rhine Rangers) with fellow soldiers, later adding impressions of popular singers to his repertoire. Meader married the German-born Vera Heller in 1955.

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Victor Spinetti
Victor Spinetti (born Victorio G. A. Spinetti, 2 September 1929) is a Welsh comic actor.
Spinetti was born in Cwm, Ebbw Vale, Wales of Welsh and Italian heritage from a grandfather who was said to have walked from Italy to Wales to work as a coal miner. His parents, Giuseppe and Lily (née Watson), owned the chip shop in Cwm, over which premises the family lived and where Spinetti was born. He was educated at Monmouth School and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, of which he is now a Fellow. Early on he was a waiter and a factory worker.
Spinetti sprang to international prominence in three Beatles' films in the 1960s, A Hard Day's Night, Help! and Magical Mystery Tour. He also appeared on one of The Beatles' Christmas recordings. The best explanation for this long-running collaboration and friendship might have been provided by George Harrison, who said, "You've got to be in all our films ... if you're not in them me Mum won't come and see them — because she fancies you." But Harrison would also say, "You've got a lovely karma, Vic." Sir Paul McCartney described Spinetti as "the man who makes clouds disappear". Spinetti would later make a small appearance in the promotional video for Paul's song, 'London Town', off the 1978 album of the same name. In July 2010 his performance of the song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", at The Festival Theatre, Malvern, would be later made available on "The Beatles Complete on Ukulele" podcast.

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Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the United States and other anti-communist countries. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist-controlled common front, largely fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The Vietnam People's Army (North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units into battle. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes.
The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. The North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong viewed the conflict as a colonial war, fought initially against France, backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state. American military advisors arrived in what was then French Indochina beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962. U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Operations spanned international borders, with Laos and Cambodia heavily bombed. American involvement in the war peaked in 1968, at the time of the Tet Offensive. After this, U.S. ground forces were gradually withdrawn as part of a policy known as Vietnamization. Despite the Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued.

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Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States.
Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.

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Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono (オノ・ヨーコ（小野洋子） Ono Yōko^?, born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese artist, author, and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront in her music which prefigured New Wave music and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933 to mother Isoko Ono, the great-granddaughter of Zenjiro Yasuda of the Yasuda banking family, and to father Yeisuke Ono, a banker and one-time classical pianist who was a descendant of an Emperor of Japan. The name "Yoko" means "ocean child". Two weeks before she was born, her father was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after and Yoko met her father when she was two. Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. In 1937, her father was transferred back to Japan and Ono was enrolled at Tokyo's Gakushuin (also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.

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John Lennon MBE
Lennon rehearses "Give Peace a Chance" in Montreal, Canada, in 1969
Background information
Birth name	John Winston Lennon
Born	(1940-10-09)9 October 1940 Liverpool, England, UK
Died	8 December 1980(1980-12-08) (aged 40) New York, New York, US
Genres	Rock, pop
Occupations	Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, artist, writer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica, harmonium, electronic organ, six-string bass
Years active	1957–75, 1980
Labels	Parlophone, Capitol, Apple, EMI, Geffen, Polydor
Associated acts	The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, Yoko Ono
Website	www.johnlennon.com
Notable instruments
Rickenbacker 325 Epiphone Casino Gibson J-160E

Persondata
Name	Lennon, John
Alternative names	Lennon, John Winston (birth name); Lennon, John Winston Ono
Short description	Rock musician
Date of birth	9 October 1940
Place of birth	Liverpool, England, United Kingdom
Date of death	8 December 1980
Place of death	New York City, New York, United States of America

Yoko Ono 小野洋子
Yoko Ono at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, Brazil
Background information
Born	(1933-02-18) February 18, 1933 (age 79) Tokyo, Japan
Genres	Avant-garde, rock, pop, electronica, Shibuya kei, Fluxus, dance
Occupations	Artist, film director, peace activist
Instruments	Vocals, piano
Years active	1961–present
Labels	Apple, Geffen, Polydor, Rykodisc, Astralwerks, Chimera Music
Associated acts	John Lennon Plastic Ono Band

Year	Song	^UK	^{U.S. Dance}	Album
1971	"Mrs. Lennon"/"Midsummer New York"	-	-	Fly
1971	"Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)"	-	-	Fly
1972	"Now or Never"/"Move on Fast"	-	-	Approximately Infinite Universe
1972	"Mind Train"/"Listen, the Snow Is Falling"	-	-	—
1973	"Death of Samantha"/"Yang Yang"	-	-	Approximately Infinite Universe
	"Josejoi Banzai (Part 2)" (Japan-only)	-	-	—
	"Woman Power"/"Men, Men, Men"	-	-	Feeling the Space
	"Run, Run, Run"/"Men, Men, Men"	-	-	Feeling the Space
1974	"Yume O Motou (Let's Have A Dream)"/"It Happened" (Japan-only release)	-	-	—
1981	"Walking on Thin Ice"/"It Happened"	35	13	Season of Glass (1997 re-release), Double Fantasy (2000 re-release)
1981	"No, No, No"/"Will You Touch Me"	-	-	Season of Glass
1982	"My Man"/"Let The Tears Dry"	-	-	It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
1982	"Never Say Goodbye"/"Loneliness"	-	-	It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
1985	"Hell in Paradise"/"Hell in Paradise" (instrumental)	-	12	Starpeace
1985	"Cape Clear"/"Walking on Thin Ice" (promo)	-	-	Starpeace
2001	"Open Your Box" (remixes)	144	25	remixes compiled on Open Your Box (2007)
2002	"Kiss Kiss Kiss" (remixes)	-	20
2002	"Yang Yang" (remixes)	-	17
2003	"Walking on Thin Ice" (remixes)	35	1
2003	"Will I" (remixes)/"Fly" (remixes)	-	19
2004	"Hell in Paradise" (remixes)	-	4
2004	"Everyman… Everywoman…" (remixes)	-	1
2007	"You’re the One" (remixes)	-	2
2007	"No, No, No" (remixes)	-	1
2008	"Give Peace a Chance" (remixes)	-	1
2009	"I'm Not Getting Enough" (remixes)	-	1
2010	"Give Me Something" (remixes)	-	1
2010	"Wouldnit (I'm a Star)" (remixes)	-	1	—
2011	"Move on Fast" (remixes)	-	1	—
2011	"Talking to the Universe" (remixes)	-	1	—
2012	"She Gets Down on Her Knees" (remixes)	-	5	—

Persondata
Name	Lennon, Yoko Ono
Alternative names	Ono, Yoko
Short description	Artist
Date of birth	February 18, 1933
Place of birth	Tokyo, Japan
Date of death
Place of death

	"Give Peace a Chance" noicon Sample of "Give Peace a Chance", recorded in 1969 during Lennon and Ono's second Bed-In for Peace. As described by biographer Bill Harry, Lennon wanted to "write a peace anthem that would take over from the song 'We Shall Overcome'—and he succeeded ... it became the main anti-Vietnam protest song."^[73]
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	Book: John Lennon
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Lennon Filmography

Lennon Filmography

Lyrics:

Make changes yourself !

Make changes yourself !

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