Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi and saw his mother only occasionally until he reconnected with her as a teen. "She just couldn’t deal with life," he said about Julia to Playboy. "I lost her twice. When I was five and I moved in with my auntie, and then when she physically died. That made me more bitter; the chip on my shoulder I had as a youth got really big then." (The new film Nowhere Boy chronicles this time in his life; for an interview with the director, click here.)

The Fab Four made hundreds of appearances at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. It was there that Brian Epstein, who became their manager, first caught their act in 1961.

In February ’64 the Beatles arrived in New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. Cynthia, Lennon’s girlfriend at art college and first wife (they wed in 1962), accompanied them.

The Beatles’ first film was the loopy, music-filled romp A Hard Day’s Night. The rock & roll musical as Elvis pioneered it had left the building.

This wildly ambitious-and successful-concept album was a landmark in rock & roll. It was the first to come with printed song lyrics.

Lennon and Yoko Ono married in March 1969 and staged an antiwar bed-in protest in Amsterdam. Lennon told Playboy later, "When we got married, we knew our honeymoon was going to be public, anyway, so we decided to use it to make a statement. We sat in bed and talked to reporters for seven days. It was hilarious. In effect, we were doing a commercial for peace on the front page of the papers instead of a commercial for war."

For an 18-month period in the early ’70s-which Lennon later referred to as his "lost weekend"-he and Ono separated and he became involved with May Pang (right of Lennon in photo), who had been the couple’s assistant. Ono, who initiated the separation, reportedly suggested to Pang that she take up with-and take care of-Lennon. In early 1975, Lennon and Ono reconciled. "It was like being sent into the desert," Lennon told Playboy in 1980 of their split. "And the reason she wouldn’t let me back in was because I wasn’t ready to come back in. I had to settle things within myself."

Less than a year after this picture was taken, Lennon was shot and killed by a deranged fan in front of his apartment building, the Dakota on New York’s Upper West Side. The couple had just released a new album, Double Fantasy. But in the last interviews he gave, Lennon was still being asked about the possibility of a Beatles reunion. "My thing is, out of sight, out of mind," he told Playboy. "That’s my attitude toward life. . . . I don’t believe in yesterday, by the way. . . . I am only interested in what I am doing now." CHECK OUT OUR PICKS FOR THE TOP 10 JOHN LENNON SONGS HERE.