Rise to Fame
The Hamburg residency is where it actually happened. Between 1960 and 1962, the Beatles played sets stretching up to eight hours in the clubs along the Reeperbahn, learning on the job in front of drunk sailors. By the time they came home, they could outplay almost anyone in Britain. The Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February 9, 1964 drew 73 million viewers, and that April, Beatles songs occupied all five slots of the Billboard Hot 100. That's not a record. It's a statement about how unprepared American radio was for what hit it.
In the Spotlight
The Sunday Times 2024 Rich List named him the first British musician to reach £1 billion in net worth. Most of it doesn't come from Beatles royalties. His company MPL Communications owns over 3,000 songs including the entire Buddy Holly catalog and rights to musicals like Grease and A Chorus Line. But the defining story of his business career is darker. He reportedly told Michael Jackson that music publishing was a good investment. Jackson bought the ATV catalog in 1985 for $47.5 million, then merged it into Sony/ATV a decade later. McCartney spent years fighting in court to reclaim his own songs. He doesn't talk about what it cost.
Side Notes
"Yesterday" started as "Scrambled Eggs" while McCartney searched for the actual lyrics. He wrote "When I'm Sixty-Four" around age 14, about a decade before the Beatles recorded it. He conditioned his Simpsons guest appearance on one demand: Lisa Simpson stays vegetarian forever. The writers agreed. She still is. He's been vegetarian since 1975, long before it became a brand strategy. He taught himself to play left-handed by flipping a right-handed guitar, which either says a lot about his resourcefulness or about the guitar market in 1950s Liverpool.