One of the greatest moments of the 20th century:

The fabled day that John Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church social in Liverpool 60 years ago — on July 6, 1957 — can appear less-than-fateful from a chronological distance of six decades.


Vaughan invited McCartney to come down on a hot Saturday afternoon to check out the Quarry Men. Lennon was 16, McCartney had just turned 15.


McCartney also has noted that in most circles, their peers were most passionate about the sports teams they supported. But when he began chatting with Lennon and discovered someone else who was interested in writing his own words and music, McCartney felt he had found a musical soul mate.


Later that evening, when Lennon, McCartney, Vaughan and some of the other Quarry Men and their friends were hanging out waiting for a dance to get underway, McCartney asked Lennon if he might borrow his guitar and demonstrate his own chops a bit. He launched into Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” a challenging number for a 15-year-old in most any circumstance, but all the more impressive since that recording hadn’t yet made the British sales charts. Then he worked his way over to a piano and gave his best Little Richard impression on “Long Tall Sally.” “Paul couldn’t have known it,” Lewisohn wrote, “but by slipping into ‘Long Tall Sally,’ he was sliding into John’s main artery. That constantly thrilling, screaming black voice of Little Richard Penniman was now coming out of Ivan’s little mate from Allerton.