Who got you into The Beatles?

[Mex]

I'd always known about the Beatles and heard their songs at home because my dad has been a huge fan for most of his adult life. The truth is I never really paid any attention to the songs, sort of wrote it off as being for "old folks". I was way more interested in listening to Guns N' Roses, AC/DC, Metallica, Motley Crue......we're talking late 80's here.

When I hit my first year of High School in 1993 somehow amidst the "Grunge" movement I found my dad's set of Beatles CD's. You know the double CD sets? The Red and Blue ones? Yeah those. On a whim I just popped the first Red CD in and listened to it with headphones on.

That's when everything changed. I knew that the Beatles were huge, but it wasn't until then that I understood why. I was blown away by not only the quality of the songs, but the QUANTITY. There were so many! On to the second Red CD and there was more! Unbelievable.

Of course I popped in the Blue discs too.....and was blown away even more because I realised that the Beatles were able to significantly change their sound, grow as musicians and not lose a stitch of quality. I've been a fan ever since.

So...long story short I got into the Beatles because of my dad. Sometimes I wonder if he left those albums out all the time on purpose...you know as a test? See if the kid has good taste I guess

Last week I kind of felt like things came full circle when I had my Dad come play Beatles RB with me. He can't play the instruments but he sure as hell can grab the mic and sing. It was a pretty cool moment to watch him sing "Here Comes The Sun"

Anyway that's the end of my cheesy story, carry on.

[linkman26]

My father bought The Beatles 1 for his anniversary with my mom and shared it with me after he found out my mom got it for him as well.

Anywhoo, with the extra copy, they gave it to me, and my dad explained to me that they were one of the most popular rock bands of all time and gave them a listen.

Fell in love with them instantly and cried when I heard yesterday for the first time.

[whymog]

(This got a bit long -- sorry about that!)

I almost never got into The Beatles.

I grew up in a household where there were plenty of records and CDs but very few were ever queued up to play. My dad listened almost exclusively to talk radio or the classic rock station, and when he talked about his favorite bands (Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers Band, The Grateful Dead) The Beatles never came up. I'd heard The Allman Brothers' double album "Eat a Peach" before I even knew what The Beatles' White Album was.

My mom owned an impressive collection of Beatles records from her childhood, but we never had a working record player. They sat in a box in the closet for as long as I could remember. I'd leafed through them a couple times, laughing at their ridiculous haircuts and marginally clever album titles.

As a teenager I lumped them into the broad genre of "oldies" -- a term that basically meant "music that has no business hanging around." Their songs sounded overly simplistic, at times insipid (Drive My Car, Eight Days a Week, Twist and Shout) or just plain weird (Piggies, I Am The Walrus). It wasn't until a few years ago that the band finally made sense to me.

There are only a handful of albums I've come across that were so powerful and consuming that I remember exactly where I was when I first heard them -- Radiohead's Kid A, The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Michael Jackson's Thriller and Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, for example. My recollection of the first time I listened to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the most vivid of all of them.

A couple summers ago, I was driving back to school from Portland to Eugene with one of my best friends from grade school. We both ended up going to college at the University of Oregon, but we had fallen a little out of touch over the years. I was excited for the trip as a chance to reconnect and share some music.

Heat's rarely an issue in Oregon -- temperatures over 90 are uncommon, even in the summer -- but this day was well over 100 degrees, and the air was thick with humidity.

So of course, my car's air conditioning decided to stop working that morning.

The freeway was packed, the car was stifling, and I was sweating to the point where the seat was fusing to my clothes. Neither of us was bold enough to talk -- the air tasted like a track meet.

It was kind of disgusting.

My friend began rifling through his bag, looking for some music to put on that would distract us from the fact that the ceiling was damp. He pulled out Sgt. Pepper and waved it at me.

I shrugged. He put it on.

What I heard wasn't supernatural, or beyond belief, or maybe not even the best album in history. But it was audacious, adventurous; it was unlike anything I'd heard. It was convoluted and over-the-top one moment and heartfelt the next.

When the album ended, it was like awakening from a daze -- not the best realization when you've been driving a couple tons of metal at freeway speeds for an hour -- and I was struggling to think of something to say. The heat may have contributed to the surreal nature of the experience, resulting in something of a poor man's spirit journey, but one thing was certain: There was something very important to be found in listening to the Beatles.

My friend and I had bonded over music when we were friends in high school, but back then his tastes (Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit) and mine (Blink-182, Sum 41 and...Limp Bizkit) were limited, to put it delicately. Thankfully, in the decade since we've both since grown a bit older and wiser -- and hearing Sgt. Pepper was proof of that.

I must have listened to that album a hundred times over the last couple years. I sought out copies of the rest of the Beatles' catalog and listened through every album. I became fascinated by the history and the mythology surrounding the Beatles and the people that were a part of it. Between the Beatles Rock Band instruments scattered around and the countless Wikipedia pages I've been scouring, my desk is beginning to look like that scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash's wife stumbles upon his shack in the woods.

I'm sure I'll eventually learn all I want to know about the Beatles, but I'll never grow tired of their music.

[nanoraiden9]

Mine is mildly odd.

I hardly ever watch TV these days, since real life and the Internet are such fantastic replacements, but back in middle school and high school I would park myself in front of the boob tube quite often. The nature of that particular beast, of course, is commercials! I could tell you more about specific products of the early 2000s than I could about most of American history. And there was a specific commercial that ran on pretty much every channel for several months.
....
Those were good moments.

Wow..I know exactly what you mean..Except I used to watch tv more in Middle School..Life changes and I moved to a different state..blah blah, I stopped watching TV, so I missed that specific commercial but wow, you just brought back huge memories, thanks for making me realize my childhood was ridiculously boring ><

[bigmf]

My Dad was an Elvis fan as a teenager and wrote off the Beatles as a bunch of youngsters that made "woo" noises. When I discovered music it was Elvis. I went through various stages; heavy metal, british new wave, rap, classic rock, prog, grunge and 90s alternative. I never got into Beatles music, until one day I saw a video which fell in line with my interests. This video captured my interest with its bright colours, and I had recently grown in my musical tastes ( I actually found myself enjoying some country music). The video was the trailer for your game. You did it Harmonix.

(edit: I don't have the twitters)

[tcole6]

My parent always listened to them, and I would occassionaly play Rubber Soul on my old record player....but it was my friend Greg Day that truly got me into the Beatles (and Fleetwood Mac...). He had recorded a radio show named "Beatles A to Z minus two", and it took like more than a dozen cassette tapes or something. We jammed to those tapes for a whole summer. I was 13 then, 42 now. That was a great summer all around.

[nanoraiden9]

Haha, same here, I remember when I was four or five, we had a CD with Yellow Submarine and Octopus's Garden on it, and I loved those songs, and then, one day, when I was.....seven or eight, but I dont remember, I do remember it was the day after the Pokemon Destiny Deoxys movie came out, lol, I went to my friends house and we were going to watch it, but his mother insisted on watching the Beatles - Yellow Submarine movie, and after that I couldn't stop listening to them. Lol.

Sorry for my double post =p i thoguht making a huge long, double quote was goinbg to be more rediculous than a double post..ANYWAY..

yeah dude, my dads been telling me to watch it.. in his own words this is what he recently said to me:

"Yeah i think its time you watched Yellow submarine..Yeah they made a movie..what? yeah it involves the submarine..yeah its yellow stupid, let me finish.. so they go around the sea of green and theres these things called the blue meanies...i wonder if its on the cable box.."

haha, i thought you might enjoy that >< anyway, any idea where i can find that movie?

[hmxsean]

This is amazing, thanks everybody. Keep the stories coming, let's make this thing huge! #BeatlesRockBand!

And don't forget that this is going on too - http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=166134

[KallenS]

My dad. When we are travelling down to Skåne, (it's at the bottom of sweden) we allways listen to Beatles - 1. It's an amazing album. Sure, we listen to alot of other cd's, including some Simon And Garfunkel, Foo Fighters and more but this one is my favourite. Songs like "Something" makes me remember my youngest childhood, my parents divorce and stuff. It's a very powerful cd. Even if "Love Me Do" allways woke me up with it's intense harmonica intro.

[Fault]

Like everyone else, I'd heard the Beatles off and on my whole life (that is, since 1981, for those keeping track), but it wasn't until I met my wife that I really got into them. Her father is in a local band that does a lot of Beatles covers, and as a family, my wife, her father, and her brothers have collectively everything there is to have Beatles. I naturally became engulfed in the Fab Four. It's really as easy as that. Though, I wish everyone had the chance to hear a live (and talented) band performing A Hard Day's Night live like I have, even if I came about many years too late for the Beatles themselves.