Let this sink in: Paul McCartney was 27 years old when the Beatles broke up. By the age LeBron James was when he won his first NBA championship, Paul McCartney had written, recorded, toured, and released 13 albums—each and every one of them a hit. Given McCartney’s astronomical early success, it’s a wonder why so much of the world turned on the artist when he escaped to Scotland in 1969 to sort out the end of the Beatles. Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back docuseries showed the band’s demise unfold over nearly eight hours of footage in 2021, minting another generation of Beatles obsessives.
