10,000 Hours to The Beatle’s Story
Hamburg played a significant role in the rise of The Beatles according to Malcolm Gladwell.
Success is intriguing. And there are few success stories as intriguing as The Beatles.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, I will never think of the Beatles and their success the same way again.
Gladwell, in his wonderful book, Outliers: The Story of Success, argues that it takes 10,000 hours to be exceptional at what you do. He suggests that, if it wasn’t for the Hamburg music scene, the Beatles would never have been the band they became. Specifically, he says that by the time they returned to England “they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them”.
So as I wandered through The Beatles Story, the museum in Liverpool that chronicles the rise of the ultimate band that is now affecting it’s third generation of listeners, I looked at the band and its success differently. I saw those 10,000 hours as the museum chronicled the rise of the Beatles from the purchase of their first guitars and getting together in high school, to Hamburg, to their first gigs at the Cavern, to the way they took the US by storm on the Ed Sullivan show. It’s a fun tour.
Photography is allowed at The Beatles Story so I took some for you.
(For more about Liverpool and a video, go to My Magical Mystery Tour – it’s not what you think.)
As the curator of the show proposes: "Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles."
For John Lennon, it started with The Quarrymen which was a skiffle band. McCartney and Harrison joined the band in '57 and '58 respectively.
The museum likes to offer replicas (the sign of a commercial museum over a public one). This is a replica of the Cavern club where The Beatles became famous.
A compilation of photos showing the rise of The Beatles in the late '60s.
The latter part of the museum focuses on John Lennon - surely as iconic as Elvis at the beginning of the tour..
And finally, John Lennon's piano.
Next week a more somber museum in Liverpool: the International Slavery Museum.
