In 1969, after ten long years together living their lives in a bubble, touring and recording, The Beatles were just plain sick and tired of each other.

They were no longer giddy 19-year-olds, they were married 29-year-olds.  They’d done it all — world tours, movies, an incredible run of #1 hits and albums, 220 songs in all.   They’d rewritten the rules on the impact that music could make on popular culture.  But they were spent, and you couldn’t blame them for deciding to call it a day.

But… what if?

Just for fun, let’s pose this question:  What if Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr had taken a well-needed break — six months, nine months, maybe a year — and then reconvened to assemble one last fabulous album?

Take a good look at the singles and albums each Beatle member released in the 18 to 24 months immediately following the band’s breakup.  There are some really outstanding tracks to be found there — some of them obvious hits, others less well known — but they stand up pretty damn well when compared to the songs the Beatles wrote and recorded as Beatles in 1968 and 1969.

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Hoo boy.

There have been previous inductees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who have turned their noses up at the honor, but this year, veteran rocker Steve Miller basically dropped a big turd in the Rock Hall punch bowl with his withering remarks following last week’s ceremony.

“This little get-together you guys have here is like a private boys’ club, and it’s a bunch of jackasses and jerks and f–king gangsters and crooks,” he said in a post-ceremony press conference and later interview, adding that the organizers disrespect the artists and make the induction experience “so unpleasant.  And every artist you talk to will tell you that.  You need to become more transparent (regarding the nomination process), and you need to include a lot more people.”

Miller’s comments may have been rude, unprofessional, and lacking taste and class…but hey, so is a lot of rock and roll, isn’t it?

His incendiary diatribe is certainly not a first.  In 2006, the Sex Pistols, Britain’s most in -your-face punk band, made it brutally clear in a rambling, incoherent letter that they would not be attending any induction ceremony.  “Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that Hall of Fame is a piss stain,” it began.  “Your museum:  Urine in wine.  We’re not coming.  We’re not your monkey, and so what?”  In 2012, Guns ‘n Roses frontman Axl Rose basically gave the middle finger to the Rock Hall, saying, “I strongly request that I not be inducted in absentia… Neither former members, label representatives nor the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should imply…that I am part of any purported induction of Guns ‘n Roses.”

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